Silicon Valley real estate, explained by the Property Nerds®

A few months after you close on a home in California, a property tax bill you may not expect shows up: the supplemental bill. It catches the county’s tax up from the seller’s old assessed value to your purchase price, and in Silicon Valley, where many homes sell to their first new owner in decades,

Every home sale in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties pays a county transfer tax when the deed is recorded. A handful of cities add their own, and San Francisco runs its own brackets. On the same price, the total can run from a few thousand dollars to tens of thousands depending on the city. Here’s

Move a few blocks across a city line here and your electric company can change. In most of the area, PG&E delivers the power over its poles and wires while a local community program supplies it. Two cities run their own electric utilities instead. Here’s who supplies electricity where, according to