Being a Palo Alto resident for the last twenty years, I have come to love Palo Alto as I truly appreciate how uniquely exceptional it is. Residents of other communities cannot understand why buyers will pay such a premium for Palo Alto homes (the Listing side of our team had 5 of our Palo Alto listings last year jump by over a million dollars!). Palo Alto’s secret sauce is that it can paradoxically combine many great attributes such as the cosmopolitan nature of a world class community, while still maintaining its small-charm appeal. While so much of Palo Alto’s appeal cannot be articulated or empirically illustrated, the supreme ratings of our schools are an easy metric to show how exceptional our schools and, indirectly, our community is.

Palo Alto being ranked as the top school district in the entire state is impressive, although not shocking. What was amazing was how dominant Palo Alto schools are at all three levels. Out of 6,222 California elementary schools ranked in 2018 by niche.com, Palo Alto has eleven of the top twelve elementary schools! Palo Alto has the two top middle schools in California as well. Gunn is ranked as the best high school in the state and Paly is strongly in the top 5. Given that California’s population hovers near 40 million and our GDP is the sixth largest in the world, for Palo Alto to dominate the state rankings at each educational level illustrates one facet of why we all love Palo Alto and how DeLeon Realty can get home buyers to pay so much for our listings.

Congratulations to our exceptional faculty, with our teachers being ranked by niche.com as the best in the entire state as well. Not too surprising given that the proof is in the pudding and these amazing results speak for themselves. On the private school side, Castilleja is the 29th best high school in the nation per niche.com out of approximately 18,500 private high schools in the nation!

Palo Alto is also uniquely exceptional in that it has birthed or been a large part of the history of many of the region’s most innovative companies. These luminaries, whose market cap exceeds $1.5 trillion, include Google, Facebook, Hewlett Packard, Tesla, VMware, Paypal, Intuit, and Palantir, all who were once or are headquartered in Palo Alto. While the media, real estate attorneys and other real estate experts often comment on the innovative approach we have brought to the real estate industry, I know that we are a product of our environment. DeLeon Realty’s innovative goals and client centric focus are consistent with Palo Alto being the epicenter of the world’s innovation. DeLeon Realty has the honor of being the only major brokerage in Silicon Valley headquartered within 10 miles of downtown.

DeLeon Realty’s sales volume in Palo Alto continues to climb every year as we have optimized the preparation and marketing of our great Palo Alto listings. Personally knowing and loving all that Palo Alto has to offer allows us to so effectively showcase and sell its many virtues. With our focus on Palo Alto and our values being consistent with our founding city, DeLeon Realty’s sales volume in Palo Alto continues to grow every year and now we are selling around six times as many listings as the second ranked team in Palo Alto (per broker metrics for 2017).
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Despite our small size, DeLeon Realty is already the second largest brokerage in Palo Alto, ahead of all of the combined independent contractor agents of Coldwell Banker, Sereno, Intero or Keller Williams (per Brokermetrics for the period from January 2017 until February 2018). We look forward to continuing to provide our Palo Alto clients with even more services and becoming the top brokerage in Palo Alto.