Santa Clara's Housing Market Is Splitting in Two, and the Line Runs Through One Zip Code

Search "Santa Clara home prices" and you'll find two numbers that don't seem to belong to the same city. Condo values have been sliding for months. Single-family homes keep climbing. If you're comparing Santa Clara against a handful of other South Bay cities right now, that contradiction matters more than the median price does, because it tells you these aren't two segments of one market cooling off together. They're two different markets, and the thing driving them apart sits inside a single zip code: 95054.

The Zip Code Doing Two Jobs at Once

North of Highway 101, 95054 covers Rivermark, the master-planned neighborhood of single-family homes, townhomes, and condos built out around 2004, along with the newer Tasman East district taking shape a short walk away near Levi's Stadium. Both fall inside the same postal boundary. Both show up in the same city-level price averages. And right now, they're behaving like they belong to entirely different housing supplies, because they do.

Rivermark's housing stock is essentially fixed. It was built two decades ago and nothing has been added since. Tasman East, by contrast, is in the middle of the largest residential construction push Santa Clara has seen in years. Understanding which of these two supplies a property sits closer to tells you more about what you're actually buying than the citywide median ever will.

Where the New Units Are Actually Landing

The Santa Clara City Council adopted the Tasman East Specific Plan in November 2018, covering 45 acres of former industrial land bounded by Tasman Drive, the Guadalupe River, and Lafayette Street. The plan allows for up to 4,500 homes, and the city is now reviewing an amendment that would add another 1,500 units on top of that. Jay Stark, a principal at the Pinyon Group, one of the developers building there, put the eventual scale plainly at a January 2026 ribbon-cutting: "When completed, there will be over 6,000 units, probably about 10,000 people."

That construction has been arriving in waves, not all at once, and nearly every unit is an apartment or a condo, not a detached house:

• The Clara and Ellore, two Related California towers with 509 rental units and a 176-unit senior living community, opened along East Tasman in spring 2025.
• Mainline North, a 151-unit affordable complex at 2310 Calle Del Mundo, cut the ribbon in January 2026 after 637 days of construction, according to the Silicon Valley Voice.
• Parkside, a 301-unit apartment project from Ensemble Real Estate Investments, broke ground in July 2026 on a roughly $190 million budget, with an opening targeted for fall 2028, per San José Spotlight's coverage of the groundbreaking.
• A second Ensemble project at 2263 Calle Del Mundo, also 301 units, secured a $150 million Bank of America construction loan in March 2026, clearing a financing hurdle that had held up the site since developers first brought it before the city in 2019.

By July 2026, more than 2,200 homes in this footprint had already been built, with the rest still moving through construction or financing. That is a meaningful, sustained addition to Santa Clara's for-sale and for-rent condo inventory, concentrated in one corridor.

Why the Pipeline Never Reaches Rivermark's Front Door

None of this touches the detached single-family stock a mile away. Tasman East was rezoned specifically for high-density, transit-oriented housing, towers and mid-rises, not single-family lots. Rivermark's supply of houses was capped when the last builder left the site around 2004. Every new unit added in Tasman East competes with existing condos and rentals for buyers and tenants. None of it competes with the supply of detached homes in an established Santa Clara neighborhood, because that supply isn't expanding to meet it.

That's the mechanism. A construction boom big enough to add thousands of units to one asset class can run for years without moving the needle on a different asset class two streets over, if the zoning keeps them separate.

What the Price Data Actually Shows

The numbers back this up, and they've held steady across multiple monthly readings, not just one outlier month.

On the single-family side, Santa Clara County's report covering activity through early August 2026 put the average sale price for single-family resale homes at $2,444,590, up 7.3% year over year, even as the number of single-family homes sold slipped 3.8% from a year earlier, a sign of tight supply more than cooling demand. City-level data for Santa Clara narrows that further: the median sale price over the three months ending May 2026 was $1.7 million, and the average house price for May 2026, the most recent month in that window, was $1.71 million, up 3.6% year over year. Homes were selling in around 12 days with an average of four offers.

Condos are telling a different story. That same county report, current through early August 2026, showed the median condo sale price down 8.7% year over year, with the average sale price down 5.2%. Condo inventory was up 9% year over year to 701 active listings, and days of inventory, a measure of how long it would take to sell every condo on the market at the current pace, rose from 78 days to 80. A report from a month earlier, current through early July 2026, showed the same pattern already building: condo median down 4.8% year over year, inventory up 6.9%. The direction has held across at least two consecutive monthly readings: more condos sitting on the market longer, at softer prices, while single-family homes keep appreciating.

Santa Clara's own Tasman East pipeline isn't the only contributor to that countywide condo softness, but it's a large and geographically concentrated one, and it lands squarely inside the city you're comparing against Sunnyvale or San Jose. A buyer weighing "Santa Clara condo" against "Santa Clara house" right now isn't choosing between two prices on the same trend line. They're choosing between an asset class absorbing a multi-year supply wave and one that structurally can't.

The Bigger Project That Isn't Coming Yet

Tasman East is not the only large development planned for north Santa Clara. The other one is stalled. Related Santa Clara, a separate 240-acre mixed-use project across Tasman Drive from Levi's Stadium, carries a development agreement that gives the developer 10 years to complete construction, with options to extend the timeline to a total of 25 years if the developer hits certain community-benefit milestones or pays a fee on unbuilt square footage, according to KQED's reporting on the November 2024 council approval. City councilmember Kevin Park summed up the frustration at that meeting: "We have a lot of potential, but we've been talking about potential for the last 20 years." The project would eventually add 1,680 more residential units, but as of the most recent public reporting we found, it had not broken ground, and nothing suggests it does so on a schedule that affects a purchase decision made this year or next. For now, Tasman East is doing the supply work alone.

Demand Isn't Backing Off Either

The condo softening isn't happening because buyers are leaving Santa Clara. The city's January 2026 municipal update pointed to Sutter Health's announcement of a $2.7 billion hospital planned for north Santa Clara, Intel's 107,000-square-foot manufacturing expansion at its Bowers campus, and a new AI certificate partnership between Mission College and NVIDIA. Those are the kinds of employers and institutions that keep housing demand structurally supported even while a supply wave works through the system. That combination, rising unit count against steady demand, is a large part of why condo prices have drifted down in the single digits rather than dropped sharply.

What This Means If You're Comparing Neighborhoods

If a Tasman East condo and a Rivermark or older-neighborhood single-family home both show up on your shortlist, they deserve two separate evaluations, not one blended read of "the Santa Clara market."

A condo near the new construction is entering a period of elevated inventory and slower absorption, which can work in a buyer's favor on price and negotiating room, but it also means resale competition from newer, amenity-rich buildings for years to come. A single-family home in an established Santa Clara neighborhood is competing against a supply that isn't growing, in a segment that has kept appreciating through the same window where condos softened.

Neither is automatically the better move. They're just different bets, and the data supports treating them that way.

A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Decide

Does the Tasman East construction affect home values in Rivermark itself? Not directly. Rivermark's single-family homes and townhomes were built out around 2004 and aren't part of the same zoning or supply pipeline as the new towers a short distance away. The two react to different pressures even though they share a zip code.

Is Related Santa Clara going to add competing condo supply soon? Not on a timeline relevant to a near-term purchase. The development agreement allows up to 25 years for completion, and as of the most recent reporting we found, the larger project had not yet broken ground.

Should I expect Santa Clara condo prices to keep softening? The trend has held across at least two consecutive monthly county reports through August 2026, with inventory rising and days on market lengthening. Factor that into an offer strategy, but treat it as a supply story tied to a specific construction pipeline, not a signal that broader demand for Santa Clara is weakening.

If you're weighing a Santa Clara purchase against other South Bay cities, or trying to decide whether a specific address puts you closer to the Tasman East supply wave or further from it, that distinction is worth a real conversation before you write an offer. Jen Marley has spent nearly two decades reading Silicon Valley's micro-markets down to the block level. Let's Connect and walk through what your target neighborhood is actually doing right now, not just what the citywide average says.