got a job offering there @ google

what are the living situations around there? expensive to rent? better to buy? nice areas?

thanks in advance!

Mountain View is on the penninsula just south of San Francisco and is fairly well to do. Your best bet is to check craigslist housing for your best prices. The good news is you'd be right where we have our gtg's!<ul><li><a href="http://www.craigslist.org/">http://www.craigslist.org/</a</li></ul>

And I understand that Google is pretty good place to work as well. It is, however, a fairly expensive place to live.

Feel free to shoot me an e-mail with any specific questions.

Andrew

Sharon works at Google...do a search on her name and you can contact her about what its like there.

Frankly I prefer Palo Alto or Menlo Park to Mountain View, but all areas are pretty expensive to rent, and really expensive to buy. It's a great area, just too many friggin' people out here now :(.

Anyway, here are the cities in order of cheaper to more expensive, both to rent and buy, in the general area:

East Palo Alto
Redwood City (except hills)
Mountain View
Menlo Park &amp; Palo Alto
Los Altos (hills are more expensive)
Atherton &amp; Portola Valley

Always can find more and less expensive properties in each city...Los Altos is mega expensive...Mt View is less expensive in general, but probably $500K+ no matter what. Lots of rental property in that region due to high tech bust. Many people moved out.

first congrats on the offer from google...you got in before the IPO &amp; hope those options work out for you :)

second, welcome to the crazy bay area housing market :(

a quick perusal of the MLS showed no single family homes in Mtn View listed for under $620k (there are only 12 listings for $750k or under). too many buyers and very little inventory = multiple offers on homes (ie. prepare to overbid by 10-50k to even stand a chance)

there's a lot of people trying to buy right now (i had been trying for 8 months until finally winning one last month), but very little inventory (and it's only going to get worse as the summer home buying season approaches)

2 bedroom Condo's in Mountain View run $600k+ these days.

Right now rentals are far cheaper than buying. Some see this as the sign of a housing bubble that will burst as soon as interest rates start going up again.

But they are both more expensive (Palo Alto in particular).

Andrew

Palo Alto and Los Altos are even more expensive (I grew up in PA). Sunnyvale, the next town over (and where I live) you probably can get a little more for your money but it's not cheap either.

You probably know the amenities there, Castro Street downtown is a nice place with lots of good restaurants.

I'll show you the good burrito places in the area

You can email me if you'd like

east coast move to west coast

and certainly an exciting time to be here. It's an amazingly busy, hectic place, but certainly energizing in a lot of ways. You're not going to get an opportunity to work in this kind of an environment any where else right now.<ul><li><a href="http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/29/technology/google/index.htm?cnn=yes">http://money.cnn.com/2004/04/29/technology/google/index.htm?cnn=yes</a></li></ul>

Most people don't understand what a force/mounts of a company Google is. Seriously the IPO will be huge and the company is going to continue to grow.. Insane!! In fact kind of jealous :) Good for you!