The school district math

What One School Rating Point Costs

Every tech parent optimizes the same two variables: commute and schools. Here's the second one, priced. We fit price per square foot against each city's composite school rating — the slope is what the market charges for one more rating point.

One rating point trades at roughly

+$273/sqft

≈ $464K on a typical 1,700 sqft single-family home

How to read this

The gap is the strategy

Cities above the fitted line charge more than their schools alone explain; cities below it are where a school-driven buyer gets the most rating per dollar. The arbitrage lives on district boundary streets — same block, different attendance zone.

Price per square foot vs composite school rating

Fitted line excludes Atherton (estate-market outlier, shown faded)

CitySchool rating$/sqftMedian price

Palo Alto 9.4 $2,356 $4.30M Saratoga 9.4 $1,679 $4.20M Los Altos 9.3 $1,788 $4.51M Cupertino 9.2 $1,642 $3.55M Atherton 9.0 $2,083 $11.20M Los Gatos 8.9 $1,390 $3.55M Menlo Park 8.7 $1,772 $4.10M Mountain View 7.9 $1,656 $3.08M Sunnyvale 7.6 $1,558 $2.78M San Jose 6.8 $986 $1.65M

The real arbitrage is at the boundary line

City averages hide it: the same house can differ by hundreds of thousands across an attendance-zone boundary you can walk in two minutes. We map target streets to actual assigned schools before you offer — and buying with us returns up to 1% of the purchase price at closing.

Methodology: composite ratings are curated 1–10 estimates per city in the spirit of GreatSchools-style composites; verify assigned schools and current ratings for any specific address before relying on them. The $-per-point figure is the slope of a least-squares fit of $/sqft against rating across tracked cities (Atherton excluded). Correlation, not causation — high-rated districts co-vary with lot size, housing stock and location. Illustrative analysis, not an appraisal.