Santa Rosa rules the real estate market in Sonoma County. No city is close in population or number of housing units, so any chart either has to have an extended scale or leave Santa Rosa out of the figures. I made two charts to illustrate just how tough Santa Rosa makes it for the rest of the Sonoma County cities to show up on a chart.
The first chart shows the volume of residential real estate transactions in Sonoma County’s busiest markets. The 17 transactions in Glen Ellen marked the lowest volume I included, so many smaller cities like Monte Rio, Kenwood, Occidental, Penngrove, Geyserville, Jenner, and Graton don’t show up at all.
Even with the elimination of many cities with small sales volumes, the bottom of the chart shows very little differentiation among cities. Even the middle of the chart with Sebastopol, Healdsburg, and Cloverdale make it hard to see much difference.
I created an identical chart without Santa Rosa. All of a sudden, the small changes among the cities are more visible. You can actually use the chart to make reasonably good estimates for the actual number of units sold.
In this example, it’s easier to see that Sonoma has almost exactly twice as many sales as Sebastopol did during this time frame. Sometimes you have to make a chart excluding Santa Rosa to show trends that can’t show up when the scale is so distorted. So, no disrespect to Santa Rosa, the undisputed champion of residential sales in Sonoma County. It’s just that your shadow blocks the view for everyone else.
Top image is from Florence Street in Sebastopol
