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Mountain View had nearly nonexistent growth in real estate values this fiscal year, an abrupt turnaround from the previous year when the city had the highest property value growth in Santa Clara County.
Overall, assessed property values in Santa Clara County increased by 4.15% this year to $725.7 billion. That’s the lowest growth since 2012, largely due to persistent issues in the commercial real estate market, according to a new report from the county assessor’s office.
The picture in Mountain View was even bleaker. The assessed value of commercial and residential properties in the city barely budged this fiscal year, rising to $47.9 billion, just a 0.51% increase from the previous year.
The rise of remote work, office vacancies and delinquencies, among other challenges, have rocked the commercial real estate sector in Silicon Valley and nationwide in recent years. “COVID disrupted practically everything in life, and property values were not immune to that,” County Assessor Larry Stone said.
According to the report, the office vacancy rate in Silicon Valley has remained at about 20% for the past two years.
Significant layoffs in the tech industry also have created a negative feedback loop, contributing to increased vacancies and declining rental rates, Stone said.
In the first half of 2025, more than 70,000 tech employees were laid off; last year, more than 150,000 employees were terminated, according to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi.
“Those people are not there anymore, don’t occupy space,” Stone said, adding that he did not expect the office market to rebound for another three or four years.
Mountain View has not been spared from these trends, experiencing a slowdown in property transfers.
Mountain View spokesperson Lenka Wright told the Voice that the city had not received detailed property tax data from the county yet but offered some preliminary reasons for the sluggish growth. Commercial properties selling for below their assessed values topped the list.
There were more than 10 commercial properties in Mountain View that sold below their roll value with declines ranging from $80,000 to as high as $80 million, according to Wright. The Shoreline Regional Park Community, a special tax district, had one commercial property that sold for $379 million below its roll value.
Stagnant growth in single family residential sales, including condos and townhomes, also was a contributing factor. “Mountain View had the lowest (percent) change in median sale prices of all detached home sales in 2024 among local jurisdictions compared to 2023,” Wright said.
Other sources of tax roll growth
Another source of roll growth for cities this year was the 2% Prop 13 assessed value increases for properties that didn’t change hands or experience new construction, according to the report.
Limited property assessments and taxes from Prop 13 come to the detriment of Santa Clara County schools, the report said. Some local districts, including in Mountain View and Palo Alto, are primarily funded with local property tax revenue.
New construction also added to the roll growth; however, it contributed 34% less growth than it did last year. The report lists several commercial development projects that have experienced significant delays due to “high interest rates, rising construction costs, and a decreased demand for office space.”
Reductions in the commercial real estate sector decreased the roll by $4.5 billion. Any value added by business properties was offset by an increase in exemptions, roll corrections and Prop 8 reductions, whereby property owners can apply for a temporary reduction in the assessed value of their property when its value is in decline.
Ninety-eight percent of the more than $100 billion in assessed value currently under appeal is commercial property, according to the assessor’s office, which expects the number of appeals filed this year to increase.
Mountain View attributed its lower rate of tax growth to a combination of successful appeals, “devalued property sales” and negative Prop 8 adjustments for both residential and commercial properties. All these factors offset the 2% Prop 13 increases, Wright said.
Mountain View also was impacted by a large appeal from Google although it has not received detailed information about it from the assessor’s office, Wright said. Prop 8 adjustments on commercial properties typically take two to three years to resolve and move more slowly than residential assessments, the assessor’s office told the city.
Outlook for the future
Despite the economic uncertainty and talk of a looming recession, Stone said he thinks the future of Silicon Valley is “bright” and that the region has “a special kind of resilience.”
“In my term as the assessor, and even when I was in the real estate investment business before this, I’ve been through the [Savings and Loan] debacle of 1990, the dot-com bust in 2000, the great recession in 2008, the COVID recession, which was not a real estate recession, it was a medical recession, and now [this],” said Stone, whose 30-year tenure as county assessor ended this month.
“So, we’ve been through these things before,” he added, noting that “80% of all [tech] R&D investment” occurs in Silicon Valley and that trillion-dollar companies headquartered in the region, like Apple and NVIDIA, continue to invest.
I’m sure the city council creating a sales tax on homes had nothing to do with fewer house sales.
I read somewhere that when you make things more expensive, people buy less of it.
That’s correct, it has nothing to do with the rate of house sales. People are not going around poring over transfer tax disclosures when deciding on where to buy a home, especially one that exceeds the $6M sale price that triggers the tax.
If MV is getting more affordable, isn’t that a good thing?
“Mountain View also was impacted by a large appeal from Google although it has not received detailed information about it from the assessor’s office, Wright said. Prop 8 adjustments on commercial properties typically take two to three years to resolve and move more slowly than residential assessments, the assessor’s office told the city.”
Could we get more information about this?
So the commercial building values are dropping. Mountain View has added a lot of commercial value in the past decade. Last year overall it was up 7.69% Taxes were collected for a whole year on that increase, and this year it goes up still more but only by 0.5% addtitional. There were few home sales last year too, not just this year. Homes almost all went up by 2% so that has to mean that commercial dropped enough that the weighted average was only 0.5%, and also the commercial property drop offset even the gains from revaluations upon residential sales. Prices on houses have still been up.
Los Altos was up by 6.17% and last year it was less than that by a fraction of a point.