What is a Burlingame Eichler worth?

There is no reliable published median, because the tract is roughly one hundred houses and turns over only a handful a year. Any twelve-month median for it is a two- or three-sale sample. We value these houses against the 94010 market as the baseline and then price the Eichler-specific factors — roof form, atrium, slab condition, glass, and how much of the original house survives — individually.

Do Eichlers in Burlingame sell for more or less than other Burlingame houses?

Neither answer is safe to publish as a number from this tract's own sales volume. The structural facts are that these are 1964–65 houses of roughly 2,100 to 2,450 square feet on Burlingame city lots with Burlingame city schools, competing against a 94010 market whose stock is mostly older and more conventional. The Eichler premium in a given sale depends far more on condition and originality than on the label.

A hundred houses · a handful of sales a year

This tract is too small to have a median.

In the San Mateo Highlands we can run a rolling twelve-month Eichler-only cohort and get something defensible, because that tract sells two to five houses a month. Mills Estate is roughly a hundred houses. Run the same calculation here and you are averaging three sales and calling it a market.

What we publish instead

The 94010 baseline, the Eichler-specific adjustments priced one at a time, and the actual comparable set for your house — named addresses, not a headline number. The working is the product.

A taupe Eichler in Burlingame, with a steep gabled entry canopy over a glazed entry court, a second gable visible through the glass, and a flat roof running off to both sides. — **The double gable.** Look through the glass: there is a **second gable inside the first**. The outer roof lifts over a glazed entry court, the inner one covers the house behind it, and the flat roof runs away level on both sides. This is the late Claude Oakland vocabulary doing the thing it was invented for — making a front door out of a wall that is otherwise deliberately blind.

A cream-painted two-storey Eichler in Burlingame, with stacked vertical-boarded volumes, a clerestory band on the upper floor, a shed roof over an open carport with a lamp post, and a walled entry court to the left. — **A two-storey Eichler, in Burlingame.** Nothing in the published record on this tract mentions two-storey models, which makes this photograph evidence rather than decoration. Note what it does **not** do: it does not put a bedroom over the living room and call it a day. The upper volume is stepped back and broken into boxes, the clerestory band carries round it, and the whole upper floor sits behind a low shed roof over an open carport — so from the kerb the house still reads horizontal.

The arithmetic problem

Why every number you have read about this tract is noise.

A hundred houses in a stable, tightly held Burlingame neighbourhood turn over at something on the order of three to six sales a year. That is the entire annual sample. One estate sale of an unmodernised original, one fully rebuilt house with a new kitchen and a foundation retrofit, and your “median” has moved by six figures for reasons that have nothing to do with the market.

Portal neighbourhood pages make it worse, not better. They draw a polygon that is not the Eichler tract — because no published Eichler boundary exists for it — and then median everything inside the polygon. You get a number built mostly from conventional 1950s hillside houses with an Eichler or two mixed in.

So the honest structure is: measure the 94010 market, where the volume is real, and then price what makes this house different from that market, one factor at a time, with reasons attached.

That is a slower answer. It is also the only one you can argue with. If we hand you a single number, you can take it or leave it. If we hand you six adjustments, you can tell us the third one is wrong — and sometimes you will be right.

The 94010 baseline →

The adjustments

What actually moves the number on an Eichler here.

Ranked by how much we have seen each one move a sale in this architecture on the Peninsula. Direction is reliable; magnitude is house-specific, which is why there are no percentages printed here.

Factor	Why it matters in this tract specifically	Direction
How much original house is left	The buyer paying the top of this market is buying an Eichler, not a 2,200 sq ft house that used to be one. Dropped ceilings, filled-in glass walls and a boxed-in entry court remove the reason they came.	Largest single factor
Roof form	A documented folded plate is the rarest thing in this tract and one of the rarer Eichler roof forms anywhere. A flat-deck house is the norm. Buyers who know the difference pay for it; buyers who do not, do not.	Up, narrow buyer pool
Atrium	At 2999 Frontera Way the atrium is 428 sq ft — real square footage that usually does not count as living area. Whether that reads as luxury or as wasted space is the most polarising thing in an Eichler showing. Atriums →	Up for the right buyer
Slab and radiant system	1964–65 copper radiant tubing in a slab is at or past the end of its design life. A documented repipe or a working original system with records is worth real money; an unknown system is a discount and a negotiation.	Down when undocumented
Glass and envelope	Single-glazed floor-to-ceiling glass is original and is also the comfort and energy complaint. Sympathetic upgrades hold value. Aluminium sliders in the wrong proportion do not.	Both ways
The hillside	Mills Estate is a hillside subdivision, so lot geometry, drainage and retaining structures vary far more house to house than they do on the flat Eichler tracts. This is where Burlingame differs most from Foster City.	House-specific
City of Burlingame status	City services and Burlingame city schools — a direct consequence of the 1946–51 annexation — rather than unincorporated county. This is the structural advantage over the Highlands and it is permanent.	Up, and stable

The comparable problem

There may be no recent Eichler sale on your street. That is normal here.

With three to six sales a year across eight streets, the probability that a genuinely comparable Eichler sold near you in the last six months is low. Pretending otherwise — reaching for a sale that is the wrong roof, the wrong condition or the wrong year — is how appraisals go wrong in this tract.

Our approach is to build the comparable set in three rings and be explicit about which ring each sale came from:

Ring 1

Mills Estate Eichler sales, however few. Usually one or two.

Ring 2

Peninsula Eichler sales of the same era and size band — Highlands, Foster City, and the late Oakland tracts — adjusted for city, schools and lot.

Ring 3

94010 non-Eichler sales in the same size and condition band, as the floor the market will not go below.

Every figure we give you carries its ring. A number without one is a guess with good posture.

Plain statement

We are not going to print a median for a hundred-house tract.

Several sites will give you one. It will be a three-sale average, or a polygon median mixing Eichlers with houses that are not, and it will move thirty per cent year to year for no reason connected to anything.

What we will do is run your house through the seven factors above, build the three rings with the addresses named, and show you the spread rather than the point. If the spread is wide, you should know that. It usually is, in this tract.

Market figures we quote for 94010 are computed from public sold records over a rolling twelve months and are re-verified against MLS before they go in anything you would rely on. Nothing on this page is an appraisal, and nothing on it is investment advice.

What we still do not know → · Where all of this comes from →

Talk to us

What is yours actually worth?

Tell us the street and roughly what has been done to the house. You get the three rings, the addresses behind them, and the adjustments written out — not a number with nothing under it.