A buyer sees two Los Altos Hills listings on the same street. Both are described as one-acre parcels. One is priced meaningfully higher than the other, and the listing photos do not obviously explain the gap. The instinct is to blame the view, the trees, or the finish level of whatever cottage happens to be sitting on the dirt. That is usually wrong. The gap is almost always the buildable envelope, and the buildable envelope is set by a formula written into the Town's Municipal Code.
The thesis is simple: in Los Altos Hills, buyers are not paying for acreage. They are paying for permitted square footage. Once you learn to read a parcel that way, most of the pricing anomalies in the market resolve.
The mechanism most buyers miss
Los Altos Hills requires a net minimum lot size of
