Monday, August 24, 2009


Looks like the winner for oldest building still standing in Menlo Park is the train station, which now serves Caltrain passengers.



This report is the 10th annual CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION of REALTORS® Buyers Survey

This report is the 10th annual CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION of REALTORS® (C.A.R.) buyer survey that details how home buyers have changed their behaviors in recent years to adapt to the new housing market environment and to the increased use of the Internet in the real estate business.

Some of the key findings include:

• Distressed sales made up more than half of sales in California. According to results from the survey, 49 percent of all buyers bought a home through a regular market sale, 38 percent bought an REO/bank-owned property, and 13 percent bought a short-sale property.

• Home buyers, in general, were optimistic about the future direction of home prices in their
neighborhood. While fewer than one in ten believed prices would go up over the next year, one-third believed prices would go up in the next 5 years, and 60 percent thought prices would go up in 10 years.

• Home buyers continued to experience considerable difficulty in obtaining financing for the homes they bought. On a scale of “1” to “10”, with “1” being “very easy” to obtain financing and “10” being “very difficult”, home buyers reported a high average level of difficulty in obtaining finance of 8.1.

• A recent study by the CALIFORNIA ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS® suggests that the financial benefits of owning a home outweigh that of renting for first-time buyers. For a first-time buyer household that purchases an entry-level home between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, 2009, the overall tax liability savings in the first five years of homeownership is well over $11,000 when compared to renters.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Great picture below of my Dad, Emmet Cameron and his friend David Packard
See below...

Merger of Agilent, Varian Brings Two Companies Full Circle









Merger of Agilent, Varian Brings Two Companies Full Circle

By Brandon Bailey
bbailey@mercurynews.com

More than 60 years ago, a group of young scientists and engineers were getting ready to change the world. Brothers Sigurd and Russell Varian started a company to develop electron tubes and other cutting-edge devices, with help from several Stanford instructors and grad students who were also pals with Bill Hewlett and David Packard.

Varian Associates would become one of the first tenants of the Stanford Research Park, later joined by Hewlett-Packard and a host of other high-tech companies. In their early years, Packard served on Varian's board and, the story goes, let the Varian crew borrow tools from the HP supply shed. Varian co-founder Edward Ginzton, who would later help build the Stanford Linear Accelerator, raced Hewlett to see whose car could reach the top of Page Mill Road first.

Now that story is coming full circle, as a company that was spun off from the renowned Hewlett-Packard is preparing to buy a company that was spun off from Varian Associates — which is not quite as well-known but has a notable history of innovation in fields ranging from radar and telecommunications to semiconductors and health science.

The purchase of Varian by Agilent Technologies, in a $1.5 billion deal announced last week, will reunite elements of two companies started by visionaries who shared a common belief in the power of technology and the importance of treating workers with collegiality and respect, said Stanford science historian Henry Lowood.

The deal could almost be considered "harmonic convergence," added local author John McLaughlin, who has written about the early days of the tech industry here. Varian Associates and HP, he said, "helped create the foundation of Silicon Valley."

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Frustrating Lack of Inventory in Menlo Park Homes


Today was Tour day...
There were only four first time tours for Menlo Park property, three homes or condos and one lot. There was absolutely nothing available in Central Menlo (Area #303, my 'hood), except the building lot, priced at $1,400,000.

Check out the chart above illustrating the sad facts -- from 24 months of inventory to 1.4 months of inventory...YIKES!!!