This ledger draws on the county’s own books: 3,678 full-value home sales recorded in Sonoma County from May 2025–May 2026. It sorts them by the square foot, the bedroom, the price band and the pool. It reports aggregates only; the Wag does not print who bought what. The assessor’s roll runs months behind the market, so the ledger ends where the record is still solid (see the method note below).
What a square foot cost
The chart gives each area’s median, with the number of sales printed on its bar. A dozen sales is too small a sample to lean on. Check the mix before comparing areas. Oakmont accounts for most of the upper valley’s volume (172 of 220 sales in our three areas), and its smaller single-story homes trade below the county’s $484 median. Kenwood and Glen Ellen, on thin volume, trade well above it.
What a bedroom count sold for
Countywide, the median three-bedroom sold for $775k and the median four-bedroom for $900k. The median four-bedroom is also 548 square feet bigger (2,132 vs. 1,584), so the gap reflects a bigger house as well as an extra bedroom. These are medians of what sold, and they do not give the price of a bedroom.
Where the market cleared
74% of the county’s sales closed under $1M, and 6% at $2M or more. The upper valley’s own median was $792k across 235 sales, most of them in Oakmont.
The vineyard trade
29 vineyard properties changed hands countywide in the window. The median size was 10 acres and the median price $2.21M. We don’t quote a per-acre figure, because 24 of the 29 carried houses or winery buildings, and any such number would price the improvements, not the land. (Bare-land vineyard values need a licensed appraisal, which the county’s books cannot supply.)
The pool question
Homes with a pool sold for a median $1.45M, compared with $750k for homes without one. That comparison flatters the pool, which tends to come attached to a bigger house on more land (median 2,325 sq ft on 0.46 acres, versus 1,581 on 0.16). Per square foot the raw gap is +32%. Compared like for like (three-bedroom homes of 1,500–2,800 sq ft on a tenth to a full acre), the gap narrows to about +12%. Treat that as a ceiling, not a price. Even inside the matched band the pool homes run bigger (1,984 vs. 1,785 sq ft), so some of the gap still reflects house size. In the valley’s own sales, 22 of 235 homes (9%) had a pool. The roll records only permitted, assessed pools, so the count leaves out unpermitted ones.
How we did this
Figures are computed from Sonoma County’s public assessor parcel roll (the Clerk-Recorder-Assessor’s “Parcels Public” data), which records each parcel’s most recent sale. We keep only full-value, single-parcel residential transfers of at least $100,000, the deals that look like a home changing hands at market price. We publish medians, never individual homes. The window ends May 2026 because the roll runs months behind the market. Later months exist in the data but carry a small fraction of their eventual sales (the 4 months we dropped held just 64 recordings between them). Reporting them as complete would mislead. “Oakmont & east valley” is the eastern arm of Santa Rosa along Highway 12. The county keeps the roll for taxation, so treat these figures as estimates, not appraisals.
Data: County of Sonoma open GIS data, used with attribution. Companion to our monthly housing-market report.
Correction & method note (Oct. 15, 2026): an earlier version of this ledger styled itself “unit economics” and charted a price-per-acre figure by lot size. That figure divided house-and-land prices by lot acreage and therefore priced houses, not land ($5M-plus “acres” on small lots). It also priced “the fourth bedroom” by subtracting confounded medians, and dated its window by a month the county’s records had barely begun to fill. All four habits are gone; the charts above are descriptive medians with their sample sizes printed on them.