Top 5 Reasons Why You SHOULDN’T Move to San Mateo County California

San Mateo County has its highs and lows. In today's video, we will be going through some of the main reasons why people choose NOT to move to SMC, and if you're thinking about making a move, maybe these reasons will change your mind as well!

Whether you're a buyer or a seller, or just curious about the macro environment, I hope you find our conversation educational and informative.

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📱Call or text: 650-822-7088

Given the length of this video, you can jump directly to any parts that are most interesting to you, with the timestamps below:

00:00 - Beginning
00:28 - The Money
03:56 - Having Kids
05:25 - Traffic
07:14 - Public Transportation
08:37 - Weather
09:53 - Conclusion

Raziel Ungar, Realtor
Compass, DRE # 01701234

[angileestokesberry]

The cost difference for construction in the bay area versus outside the bay area is so extreme! And driving in the bay can be absolutely unpredictable!

[_Hertz]

Humans are gonna price humans out of existence...We put value on the things we need at the end of the day...

[rexphvc]

I’m so grateful for the weather in SMC!!!

[yesloow]

The cost of housing is everything. We used to live in San Mateo and then Menlo Park. The community is completely hollowed out. People cannot afford to live there and work at your local Safeway or burrito place. So they need to commute in. Ask the folks at your Trader Joe’s where they live. To get these employees to commute over from Danville and whatnot you need to pay them more. So all the costs are now higher. When we moved to the East Bay (where we decided to buy), we faced construction costs there because our contractors had to pay $40-$50 an hour for guys hanging drywall just because their commute in was $$$. Then you have property taxes. Easily over $40k per year on your $2M home in Palo Alto. Yes it’s beautiful there, but the community is hollow and your kids cannot afford anything nearby, ever. When Stanford University has to massively subsidize graduate student housing and is starting to lose top medical staff and grad students to other universities and top tier hospitals because housing is so expensive, it’s a real problem, and the cities on the Peninsula are way too slow to respond, coasting on a fantasy that the standard of living there doesn’t come at a massive long term cost.

[Mike__B]

"We have BART" yeah, no... you really don't, a few SMC cities near SF have BART (and Millbrae as the outlier) that all have massive parking structures attached to them (due to requirements of said SamTrans service being crap) but SMC largely NIMBY'd that away when BART was being created 50 years ago and the ripple effects of that are seen to this day, San Jose is paying a fortune for it now, and as mentioned traffic sucks.

[clemdane]

What I don't like about houses in California is that no matter the size of the lot they build the house all the way up to the border of the property, which means there is no privacy. It also doesn't feel luxurious to me. In the Northeast where I am from, luxurious neighborhoods had both huge houses and large amounts of land and trees around them so that you couldn't see your neighbors at all. I saw that even in the most expensive neighborhoods of California (e.g., Atherton) the sides of the houses had barely any space between them and their neighbor. That gave me a lot of cognitive dissonance because it didn't feel "luxurious" or expensive to me.