Many times over the years, when counseling new buyer clients, I have pointed out that the majority of the homes in Berkeley are older, built in the early part of the 1900s. I know this anecdotally, and from looking at so many homes over the years, but I had not seen any actual figures. I thought it would be interesting to look at the data, so I went to my handy public records database and looked at records for the single family homes in Berkeley.

A couple things to keep in mind:  (1) I only looked at structures that are currently listed as single family homes in the database.  Homes that have been converted to business use, or to condos or apartments, or that were destroyed over the years, are not included. (2) The numbers that follow are derived from information from the public records database, but the data there is not completely accurate.  Please take all these numbers as approximations, to give a sense of the magnitudes, rather than exact counts.

The total number of single family homes in the database for Berkeley is 17,682.  The 7 oldest homes listed in the data have a “Year Built” of 1880.  I was surprised to see that these 7 homes are scattered around Berkeley. I expected most of the oldest homes to be in the Oceanview area, but I think many of the historic properties there are no longer single family homes.

The next oldest homes in the current Berkeley housing stock are the 198 homes built from 1881 to 1900.  Building in Berkeley increased substantially after that, giving us 5502 single family homes built from 1901-1920.  The greatest concentration of homes in our current housing stock were built between 1921 and 1930 (6327 homes).  The Bay Bridge opened in 1936, but by then the biggest wave of construction had already passed.  Today, the City of Berkeley has 3140 homes that were built from 1931-1950, and the number of homes built per decade tapers from there.

Overall, the average “year built” of the single family homes still in existence (according to this database) is about 1930, so that gives us the answer. Our stock of single family homes is, on average, approaching 90 years old!