How much does it cost to build a home in Silicon Valley? (2016)

Had a chat with our insurance agent recently; she wants us to increase our insurance coverage on our home in old palo alto, which is currently calculated based on $350&#x2F;sq.ft. rebuild cost. She said that clients in the burned-out areas in Santa Rosa were being quoted much higher rates, and although she admitted that was partly due to a large number of people competing for contractors all at once, she believes $450 is a more realistic replacement cost basis.<p>That would be also based on replacing the existing structure, which is single-story, no basement.<p>What almost always happens when an older house is sold in this area, is that the property sells for between 1M and 2M, is immediately scraped and replaced by a two-story-plus-full-basement (with home theater and au-pair apartment), which then sells for 6M-8M with a profit of circa 1.5M.

Maybe I&#x27;m missing something but it looks like she omitted general contractor fees unless she rolled them into the sq&#x2F;ft cost. Not that most people are qualified but I know people who GC the projects themselves to save a great deal of money. It&#x27;s worth calling out as it&#x27;s own item...<p>I found an up and coming architect so my design fees were substantially less than my GC fees... by about 8-10x.

I&#x27;ve always wondered what software developers make in the heart of silicon valley. I see some things that basically say &#x27;more than Portland but only by maybe 50% or so&#x27;, which means perhaps $180K or so? Nobody is buying a million dollar house on that kind of income, but in Portland (where I think houses are pretty expensive) someone making $120K wouldn&#x27;t have any problem buying a perfectly fine place, even pretty close in to the urban core.<p>Maybe I&#x27;m getting my numbers from the wrong place.

Not sure what I am supposed to do with the extra 3500 square feet there...

The comments in this thread focus on senior engineers, but a lot of the big earners I know in the Bay Area aren&#x27;t engineers--they may be in tech, but senior BD, marketing, product, finance, legal, and especially sales people can all make well north of $300k. At my last company the biggest W2&#x27;s were all sales people.

This is an interesting article that describes building a $2-6 million dollar house in a matter-of-fact manner. I wonder what the prospective audience size for this article is in the Bay Area –maybe less than 5000 local people are capable of affording these properties.

Let me see...<p>I can either spend next 15 years, hoping that tech market doesn&#x27;t crash again and using my SWE salary to pay off property taxes and mortgage on a crappy SV house, making rent-seekers of all sorts rich...<p>... or I can pocket the money, and be financially independent when I&#x27;m 35-45, and spend rest of my life with family and working on interesting open source&#x2F;business projects of my choosing.<p>Tough one.

these numbers seem wildly inaccurate