South Bay Buyers Are Quietly Moving to Tiburon and Marin

What I have been seeing on the ground

Let me start with the honest, unscientific part. Over the past year, more of the buyers I work with on the Tiburon side of a deal have been South Bay owners: people selling in Santa Clara County or on the Peninsula and looking to buy up north. This is an observation from my own closings, not a measured trend, and I am not going to attach a number to it. It is simply what I have been seeing on the ground.

A few years ago that buyer looked different. The South Bay owner who could afford Tiburon usually was not thinking about it, because the money did not stretch any further north than it did at home. That calculus has shifted, and the county data is the cleanest way to see why.

I want to be careful here, because a handful of my own closings is exactly the kind of thing people over-read into a trend. So take the rest of this as market education built on public numbers, not as a claim that everyone is packing up and heading north. The point is narrower: for a certain South Bay owner, with a certain job and a certain budget, the door to Marin opened in a way it had been closed before.

The number that flipped: Marin's county median

Here is the part that surprises people. Per C.A.R. (the California Association of Realtors), the May 2026 single-family county medians looked like this: Marin at $1.81M, down 4.0% from a year earlier; Santa Clara at $2.1M, down 3.3%; San Mateo at $2.401M, up 9.1%; and San Francisco at $2.2M, up 22.2%.

Read those two lines against each other. Marin's county median now sits below Santa Clara's, and well below San Mateo's. That was not the usual order. For a South Bay owner, it means a budget that buys a comfortable but ordinary house in Santa Clara County can, in Marin, reach something quite different: hillside land, water views, acreage, and real privacy. Cities like Los Altos and Palo Alto sit inside Santa Clara County, so an owner selling there is measuring their proceeds against that same shifted map.

One important caution, because the median is easy to over-read. A county median is just the middle sale price across an entire county, the price with half of sales above it and half below. It is not the price of any particular city, and the top tier of any one city can behave very differently from its county median. Tiburon is a good example: it is one of the more sought-after addresses in Marin, and its own prices do not move in lockstep with the county-wide figure. So treat the four county medians above as the reliable, sourced numbers here, and treat what a given budget actually buys in Tiburon as a conversation about specific homes, not a formula.

The commute math changed direction

The second thing that changed is the commute, and it changed in a direction that catches people off guard.

Golden Gate Ferry runs from downtown Tiburon to the San Francisco Ferry Building in about 30 minutes, per the ferry schedule. That is a walk-on boat ride across the Bay, not a merge onto a freeway. And several of the major tech and AI offices now sit a short walk from the Ferry Building. Anthropic's offices are on Howard Street, in an area the press has nicknamed AI Alley, and OpenAI is nearby in Mission Bay. If your job moved into the city, Tiburon is genuinely commute-viable in a way that is easy to underestimate until you have timed the boat.

Now hold that against the South Bay picture. The classic South Bay commute is a freeway commute, and for someone whose office is no longer in Santa Clara County at all, driving north into San Francisco every day is the harder version of the trip, not the easier one. That is the reverse logic worth sitting with: as more high-earning tech work concentrates in San Francisco, Marin has quietly become the more practical home base for a city commuter, while the South Bay becomes less practical for that same person.

I want to keep this balanced, because the geography is genuinely mixed rather than one-directional. Per press reports (The Real Deal), Silicon Valley office vacancy fell to about 14.1% in the second quarter of 2026 as some companies expanded south as well. Tech work is not all draining out of the South Bay. The honest framing is conditional: if your office is now in the city, the ferry changes your math, and it is worth actually checking rather than assuming your old commute still applies.

What the move actually trades

None of this is free, and the trade-offs are the part that gets glossed over in a headline. A South Bay lot tends to sit on a flat grid: level ground, a driveway off a straight street, a yard you can walk across. A Tiburon parcel is often a hillside parcel, which means grading, stairs, and a driveway that climbs. Hillside living has real rewards and it is not for everyone, and that is a conversation to have honestly with yourself before you fall for a view.

On schools, as a factual amenity: Tiburon addresses generally feed the Reed Union School District for kindergarten through eighth grade, and Redwood High School in Larkspur, part of the Tamalpais Union High School District, is the public high school that serves the area. That is the district structure, nothing more.

There is also a scale difference to weigh. A South Bay home is often built for convenience: close to services, close to the freeway, close to the office you may no longer drive to. A Tiburon home is more often built around a setting. That can mean more land and more quiet, and it can also mean more house and grounds to maintain than you are used to. Neither is better in the abstract. They are different bets, and the right one depends on how you actually want to spend a Saturday.

Then there is the water and open space, which is much of the reason people look north in the first place. Ring Mountain Preserve offers panoramic views of the Bay and Mount Tamalpais. Blackie's Pasture is waterfront open space with a paved trail that runs along the shoreline into downtown. And from the same downtown dock as the San Francisco ferry, you can catch a boat to Angel Island. It is a lifestyle built around the water, and it is a real part of what the higher price of entry is buying.

How these purchases actually happen at the top

Here is a piece that trips up buyers coming from anywhere, the South Bay included: at the high end of Tiburon, many of the best homes are never listed publicly. A good number of these purchases happen off-market. An off-market sale is one that never appears in the public listings; it is handled privately between agents, and it is common at the high end, where buyers and sellers both value their privacy.

That has a practical consequence. If you are watching the public sites and waiting for the right Tiburon home to appear, you may simply never see the one that would have suited you, because it changed hands before it ever reached a portal. Getting into that quieter flow is a large part of the work at this level. If you want the mechanics, here is how off-market sales work in Tiburon.

It also helps to recalibrate what the very top of the market looks like. Some of these properties are less a single house than a resort compound: three structures on one parcel, arranged for privacy and for the view rather than for a neighbourhood street. That is not every purchase, and it is not the point of this article, but it is worth knowing that the top tier does not resemble a standard South Bay listing, and it does not trade like one either.

What this means for you

So what does this mean for you? It depends on which side of the move you are standing on.

If you are a South Bay owner weighing the move, start with a few concrete checks rather than the headline. First, run your real budget, your likely sale proceeds, against the actual Marin market, not against the county median in the abstract. Second, look honestly at your commute: if your office is now in San Francisco near the Ferry Building, time the ferry before you decide the trip is worse than what you have; if your work is still anchored in the South Bay, the math may not favor the move at all. Third, be honest with yourself about hillside living, because a Tiburon parcel is a different daily experience from a flat South Bay lot.

If you already own in Marin and you are thinking about selling, the takeaway is that your buyer pool has widened. Some of the interest now comes from the south, from owners cashing out of Santa Clara County and the Peninsula who are measuring Marin against a map that has shifted in your favor. That does not guarantee a price or a fast sale, and every situation is different. What it does mean is that pricing and marketing a Marin home today is worth doing with that newer, out-of-county buyer in mind.

Whichever side you are on, the useful next step is to look at real numbers for your specific situation rather than the county-wide figure. If you want to talk it through, call or text me at (415) 910-3958.

Lily Garipova

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