Downsizing in Silicon Valley: The Bay Area Guide for Homeowners Over 60

A complete guide to downsizing from a long-held Bay Area home, with no download gate and no form to fill out. What happens to forty years of belongings, how the Proposition 19 property tax base transfer actually works, how to time the sale against the move, and where people around here really go. Written by Seb Frey, a real estate downsizing specialist serving the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.

Most of what gets written about downsizing was created for somewhere else, in another time. It assumes your house is worth $400,000, that your property tax bill follows the value of the home, and that the hardest part is deciding which couch to keep. None of that describes the situation of long-time Silicon Valley homeowners today. Here, you're likely sitting on a home you bought for a fraction of what it's presently worth, paying property taxes assessed decades ago, with forty years of accumulated life inside it and a state tax rule that can save you or cost you five figures a year depending on the order you do things in.

This page is the starting point I wish existed when I first started doing this work. It covers what actually happens when a long-time Bay Area homeowner leaves a large house: the belongings, the Proposition 19 tax base transfer, the sequencing problem of selling one home while moving into another, and where people around here really end up. There's no download gate and no form you have to fill out to read it. If you want to talk afterward, my number's at the bottom.

What's on this page

Downsizing from a large home, and what that really means
What happens to forty years of belongings
Proposition 19 and your property tax base
Timing the sale against the move
Where Bay Area downsizers actually go
Common questions

1. Downsizing from a large home, and what that really means

The word "downsizing" makes it sound like a square footage decision. In practice, almost nobody I work with is moving because of square footage. They're moving because of stairs, because the yard has become a part-time job, because a spouse died and the house got quiet, because a fall in the hallway turned into three weeks of rehab, or because the adult kids have started asking careful questions over Thanksgiving dinner.

That distinction matters, because it changes what you're actually shopping for. A 3,200 square foot two-story in Almaden Valley with a pool isn't a problem because it's big. It's a problem because the primary bedroom is upstairs, the laundry's in the garage down three steps, the pool costs $200 a month to keep blue, and the roof is twenty-six years old. Someone who trades that for a 2,400 square foot single-level home in Willow Glen has barely downsized on paper and has completely solved the problem.

So the first conversation I have isn't about price. It's about what the house is asking of you that you no longer want to give it. Usually the list comes out like this:

Vertical living. Stairs are the single most common reason people move. Not because they can't climb them today, but because they've done the arithmetic on what happens if they can't climb them in four years.
Deferred maintenance that's now a number. Roof, sewer lateral, foundation, electrical panel, furnace. On a house bought in 1987, these often come due all at once, and a $90,000 punch list is a real motivator. If that list is the main reason you feel stuck, selling as-is is worth a look before you spend a dollar on it.
Too much unused space. Three bedrooms that haven't been slept in since 2009, and you're still heating and insuring them.
Isolation. This one gets mentioned last and matters most. Neighbors turned over, driving got harder, and the house that was the center of everything is now somewhere you're alone most of the week.

The "should we just renovate" question

A lot of people ask whether it's smarter to stay and adapt the house instead. Sometimes it is. A first-floor primary suite conversion, a walk-in shower, wider doorways, and better lighting can buy a decade in a home you love, and it doesn't cost you your Proposition 13 tax base. If the house has a reasonable footprint and you're attached to the neighborhood, run that number before you run the sale number.

What usually kills the renovation option isn't cost, it's the lot. If the house is two stories with no room to expand on the ground floor, you're renovating your way into the same problem. And it's worth knowing that new construction gets assessed at market value as added value, so a large addition raises your tax bill even though your original base stays protected.

What a smaller home in this market actually costs

Santa Clara County's median single-family sale price was $1,894,440 in August 2026, essentially flat against the year before. That's the number people react to when they hear "downsizing doesn't save you money around here," and it's fair as far as it goes. A three-bedroom single-level home in a good Santa Clara County neighborhood is not cheap.

But the comparison that matters isn't your old house against a new house. It's your total annual cost of living in each. That means the mortgage or lack of one, property taxes (which is where Proposition 19 comes in, and it's the biggest lever on this page), insurance, utilities on a smaller envelope, maintenance you're no longer deferring, and whatever you were spending on landscaping, pool service, and housekeeping. I've watched people cut $2,500 a month out of their cost of living by moving to a home that cost roughly what they sold for. If you want a starting number for your own house, my home valuation page is the fastest way to get one.

Cover of the free Downsizing Guide for Bay Area Seniors

Simple Strategy Guide

The Downsizing Guide for Bay Area Seniors

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2. What happens to forty years of belongings

This is the part that stops moves. Not the financing, not the inspection, not the offer. Families call me in March saying they want to sell in the spring, and then September arrives and nothing has happened because nobody could face the garage.

Let me be direct about the thing nobody wants to say out loud, and then I'll tell you what actually works.

Most of it isn't worth what you think, and some of it is worth more

Consumers' Checkbook, which takes no advertising and has no dog in this fight, puts it plainly: most household items won't sell for anything close to what you or your parents paid for them decades ago. Formal china, crystal, Hummel figurines, and mass-market dining sets from the seventies and eighties are the usual casualties. The generation that would have bought them isn't buying them, and the generation below that lives in smaller places.

The "brown furniture is dead" line has been repeated so often that it's now overcorrected, though. Kovels, which has been publishing antique price data since the sixties, reported a real uptick in demand from younger buyers, and the 1stDibs 2026 designer survey had chocolate brown as the most-cited color for the year. The spread is what's telling. A 1960s Broyhill dresser might bring $100 while a marked Gustav Stickley bookcase brings $4,800. The difference isn't age or wood tone, it's whether the piece is identifiable, marked, and well made.

Which leads to the only rule I'd give you here: don't decide what's valuable yourself, and don't let a hauler decide either. Get one set of trained eyes on the contents before anything leaves the house. That's usually a couple of hours and it's the cheapest insurance in the whole process.

The four channels everything goes through

Channel	What it's for	What to expect
Family	The pieces with a story attached	Ask early and ask specifically. "Does anyone want anything" gets you nothing. A shared photo list with a claim-by date gets you decisions.
Estate sale company	Houses with enough saleable volume to justify a two or three day sale	Commissions typically run 30% to 50% of proceeds, with minimum fees commonly between $500 and $3,000. Some charge separately for hauling away what doesn't sell. Get that in writing.
Donation	Clothing, housewares, furniture in usable shape	Fast and dignified. Just don't count on the tax deduction doing much work (see below).
Junk removal	Everything left	Budget for it as a line item, not a surprise. A full house is usually several truckloads.

On the charitable deduction

People often keep things longer than they should because they're waiting to "do the donation right." Here's the shape of the rules, per IRS Publication 526. You have to itemize to deduct anything at all, and most retired households now take the standard deduction. Clothing and household items generally have to be in good used condition or better. Gifts of $250 or more need a written acknowledgment from the charity, total noncash gifts over $500 require Form 8283, and anything over $5,000 in a category needs a qualified appraisal.

Put together, that usually means the appraisal costs more than the deduction is worth. Donate because it's the clean way to move usable things to people who need them, and treat any tax benefit as a bonus. Talk to your CPA before you build a plan around it.

Senior move managers are worth knowing about

There's an entire profession built around exactly this, and most people have never heard of it. Senior move managers plan the move, sort and organize with you rather than at you, draw a scaled floor plan of the new place so you know in advance what actually fits, arrange the estate sale or donation pickups, hire and supervise the movers, and then unpack and set up the new home so the first night isn't spent on a mattress surrounded by boxes.

The trade body is NASMM, the National Association of Senior Move Managers. Members complete their Cornerstone coursework, and some hold A+ Accreditation or the SMM-C certification, which are worth asking about. NASMM deliberately doesn't publish price ranges because the work varies so much by house and scope, but their own standard is that a member will give you a written estimate before you pay anything. If someone won't, that tells you something.

Some people hire a move manager for the whole job and some hire one for a single day of sorting to break the logjam. Both work. I keep a short list of people in Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties I've watched do this well, and I'm happy to hand it over whether or not you ever list with me.

A sequence that actually finishes

Measure the new place first. Everything gets easier when the question is "does this fit in the new living room" instead of "can I bear to part with this."
Start with paper, not furniture. Files, photos, documents, and the safe deposit box. These take the longest and nobody else can do them for you.
Do the family round. Photo list, claim-by date, and then it's settled.
Bring in the appraiser or estate sale company before anything goes to the curb.
Run the sale or the donation haul, then the cleanout.
Prep the house for market last. An empty or lightly staged house photographs better and inspects cleaner.

Seasoned Living Strategist

I help families with homeowners over sixty plan and execute the sale of a home for maximum financial advantage.

3. Proposition 19 and your property tax base

If you take one thing from this page, take this one. For a long-time Santa Clara County homeowner, the Proposition 19 base year value transfer is usually worth more than every other financial decision in the move combined, and it's forfeited constantly because people don't know it exists or file for it too late.

The problem it solves

Say you bought in 1985 for $200,000. Under Proposition 13, your assessed value has climbed by no more than 2% a year since, so your 2026 factored base year value sits somewhere around $450,000. At Santa Clara County's blended rate of roughly 1.19%, that's about $5,400 a year in property tax.

Now suppose you sell and buy a single-level home for $2,000,000 with no relief. That home gets assessed at what you paid, and your tax bill becomes roughly $23,800 a year. You moved to a smaller, simpler house and your property tax went up more than four times. That's the trap, and it's why a lot of people who should move don't.

What Proposition 19 lets you do

If you're over 55, it lets you carry your existing assessed value with you to a replacement home. Here are the rules as they stand:

You must be over 55 at the time you sell the original home. Not at the time you buy the new one. Selling three weeks before a 55th birthday disqualifies the claim entirely.
Both homes have to be your principal residence, eligible for the homeowners' exemption. Rentals and second homes don't qualify.
The purchase and the sale have to be within two years of each other, in either order. You can buy first and sell after, or sell first and buy after.
You can use it three times in your lifetime.
The replacement home can be anywhere in California, any county. This is the big change from the old Proposition 60 and 90 rules, which mostly locked you into your own county.
Condos, townhomes, and manufactured homes on owned land all count as replacement homes.

The part people get wrong: buying up

The old rule was that the replacement had to be equal or lesser value, full stop. Proposition 19 changed that. You can now buy a more expensive home and still keep most of the benefit, because only the difference above a threshold gets added to your transferred value.

The threshold depends on when you buy relative to when you sell:

When you buy the replacement	Threshold, as a percentage of the original home's market value
Before you sell the original	100%
Within the first year after the sale	105%
In the second year after the sale	110%

If the replacement costs less than that threshold, your assessed value transfers straight across with no adjustment. If it costs more, the excess above the threshold gets added on top of your transferred value.

Two worked examples, with Silicon Valley numbers

Trading down. You sell the Willow Glen house for $2,400,000 in October and buy a single-level home for $1,100,000 the following March, which is inside the first year, so the threshold is 105% of $2,400,000, or $2,520,000. The new home is well under that. Your assessed value stays at roughly $450,000 and your tax bill stays near $5,400 instead of jumping to about $13,100. That's roughly $7,700 a year saved, every year, for as long as you own it.

Trading down in size but up in price. You sell for $2,000,000 and buy a single-level home in Los Altos for $2,800,000 eight months later. The threshold is 105% of $2,000,000, or $2,100,000, so $700,000 gets added to your transferred base. Your new assessed value is about $1,150,000 and your tax bill is roughly $13,700 instead of about $33,300. You still save close to $19,600 a year, which surprises people who assume buying up disqualifies them.

Figures are illustrative and use a 1.19% blended county rate. Your assessor's calculation governs.

Filing it, and the deadline that costs people money

Nothing is automatic. You file a claim, and if you don't file it, you simply pay the higher tax.

The form is BOE-19-B, the claim for transfer of base year value for persons at least age 55.
You file it with the county assessor where the replacement home is located, not where the old home was. This trips people up constantly on cross-county moves.
The deadline is three years from the date you purchased or completed the replacement home. File on time and any tax already levied at the higher value gets cancelled or refunded.
File late and you get prospective relief only, starting from the year you filed. Those intervening years are gone permanently.
Santa Clara County charges a $110 fee to process the claim, and publishes an online estimator so you can model the result before you commit.
Title held in the name of a corporation, partnership, or other legal entity doesn't qualify. A present beneficiary of a trust does.

It stops at the state line

This is the asymmetry nobody mentions until it's too late. The base year value transfer works to any county in California, so Sacramento, Sonoma, Santa Cruz, Placer, San Luis Obispo, and Palm Desert all keep it intact. Move to Nevada, Texas, Arizona, or Oregon and you give it up completely, along with that use of the allowance. For someone carrying a $450,000 assessed value into a $1.1 million home, that benefit is worth something like $7,700 a year, and it needs to be weighed honestly against whatever the out-of-state move saves you.

While we're on taxes: the capital gains problem

The federal exclusion on the sale of a principal residence is $250,000 for a single filer and $500,000 for a married couple filing jointly, and you need to have owned and lived in the home at least 24 months of the last five years. Those amounts haven't been raised since 1997. On a house bought in Santa Clara County in 1985, the gain can run past the exclusion by a wide margin, and California taxes capital gains as ordinary income with no preferential rate.

Two things are worth raising with your CPA early. First, if you're widowed, California is a community property state, which means that when one spouse died the entire property generally received a new cost basis at the date-of-death value, not just the deceased spouse's half. That single fact can erase most of a taxable gain, and plenty of people don't know it applies to them. Second, a surviving spouse can generally still use the full $500,000 exclusion if the home is sold within two years of the death and they haven't remarried. That's a real deadline, and it's one more reason the timing of this move deserves a professional look rather than a guess.

And Proposition 19 changed inheritance too

Many families' plan used to be "leave the house to the kids so they inherit the low tax bill." That plan mostly doesn't work anymore. Since February 2021, the parent-child exclusion only applies to a family home or family farm, and the child has to move in and make it their own principal residence within a year. Even then the exclusion is capped at the parent's factored base year value plus about $1,044,586 for transfers between February 2025 and February 2027, with the excess added to the assessed value. The old exclusion for rental and commercial property was eliminated entirely. If your estate plan was built before 2021, it's worth having an estate attorney look at it.

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4. Timing the sale against the move

Here's the practical bind. You need the equity from the sale to buy the next place, but you can't move out of a house you haven't sold into a house you haven't bought. Everyone hits this, and there are only a handful of real answers.

Buy first, sell second

This is the cleanest experience by a wide margin and, as it happens, the best Proposition 19 outcome, because buying before you sell gets you the 100% threshold instead of 105% or 110%. You move at your own pace, you sort the belongings without a deadline hanging over you, and the old house goes on the market empty and clean, which typically sells better anyway.

The obstacle is money. Options, roughly in order of how often they actually work around here:

A home equity line of credit drawn before you list. This is the single most common avoidable mistake in a downsizing timeline. Most lenders won't originate a HELOC on a home that's listed for sale, and many will freeze an existing line the moment it hits the MLS. Underwriting also looks at current income, which for a retired household can be thin even with substantial assets. If there's any chance you'll want this, set it up months ahead of listing, not weeks.
Bridge financing. Short-term, interest-only, secured against the departing home. The rate is higher than a first mortgage and there are fees, but on a sub-six-month horizon the total cost is often less than what you'd lose selling under pressure. Availability and terms move around, so get current quotes rather than relying on a program you read about.
Securities-based lending. Common in this area, where a lot of retirees are holding concentrated equity positions they'd rather not sell into a taxable event. Borrowing against the portfolio instead can be cheaper than the capital gains bill.
A cash-out refinance before listing, subject to the same pre-listing constraint as the HELOC.
Family. A short-term loan or gift from adult children, documented properly. This happens more than people admit and it's often the cheapest capital in the room.

Sell first, then rent back

If buying first isn't realistic, the standard tool is a rent-back, where you sell the house and stay in it for a defined period after closing. In California there are two different instruments and the dividing line is 30 days, which matters more than it sounds like it should.

	Seller in Possession	Residential Lease After Sale
Use it for	29 days or fewer	30 days or more
Legal nature	A license to stay, not a tenancy	An actual landlord-tenant relationship
What that triggers	Tenant protection rules generally don't attach	Full California residential tenancy law, potentially including local rent control and just-cause rules
Money held	A possession fee, returned within five days of vacating in agreed condition	A regulated security deposit

The reason this matters for a 60+ seller is that 29 days is often not enough time. A continuing care community may not have a unit available on that schedule, a senior move manager books out weeks ahead, and an estate sale takes planning. Meanwhile buyers and their lenders frequently resist rent-backs past 30 days precisely because crossing that line makes them a landlord with exposure they never signed up for. So the realistic paths are a tight sub-30-day rent-back, a temporary furnished rental in between, or buying first.

When to list

The Bay Area selling season starts earlier than the national one. Nationally, ATTOM's analysis of millions of sales has May as the strongest month for seller premiums, but in San Jose the sweet spot lands earlier, with the second half of March historically producing the strongest results. Practically, that means preparing in January and February, listing late February through April, and treating the late September through December stretch as the weakest window of the year. My market timing analysis goes deeper into how much the calendar is actually worth.

That seasonality argues for starting the belongings work in the fall, well before anyone talks about a listing date. The house work is fast. The belongings work is not.

5. Where Bay Area downsizers actually go

This is the question I get asked most and the one where generic advice is least useful, because the options here are genuinely different from the rest of the country. Here's the honest landscape.

A smaller home in the same area

The most common choice by far, and usually the best one when the motivation is stairs and maintenance rather than care. A single-level, senior-friendly home, a townhome, or a condo in the same part of the county keeps the doctors, the friendships, and the routines intact. Proposition 19 carries your tax base across, and a condo or townhome qualifies just as a house does.

The trade-off is that single-level homes in Santa Clara County are scarce and priced accordingly, because everyone wants them for the same reason you do. Inventory in that category moves quickly, which is an argument for being financially ready to buy before the right one shows up.

Active adult and 55+ communities

The anchor in Santa Clara County is The Villages Golf and Country Club in the Evergreen foothills of San Jose. It's 2,536 homes on roughly 1,200 acres, built between 1967 and 2000, gated, age 55 and up, with a championship golf course, four clubhouses, pools, tennis, an equestrian center, and well over a hundred clubs. Homes run from the mid-$400,000s for condos up through the seven figures for the larger detached homes, with an average around $729,000. Monthly assessments are significant and vary a lot by home type, so ask the business office for the current figure on the specific property rather than working from a listing sheet.

The thing people misjudge about The Villages is the social architecture. It's not a retirement home, it's a town with a clubhouse calendar, and for someone who's been rattling around a big house alone, that's frequently the whole point.

I keep a running list of 55+ and independent living homes for sale around the Bay Area, which is the fastest way to see what's actually available at any given moment. Smaller 55+ communities exist across the region too, including Los Gatos Commons and Villa Capri in Los Gatos, Woodland Estates in Morgan Hill, Valley Oaks in Gilroy, and Bay Village and Pajaro Village in Watsonville. Notably, San Mateo County has essentially nothing at scale in this category, which is why Peninsula downsizers tend to go the condo route or straight to a continuing care community.

Continuing care retirement communities

The Bay Area has an unusually deep bench of these, sometimes called life plan communities, and they're a genuinely different product from anything else on this list. You pay a one-time entrance fee plus a monthly fee, and in exchange you get independent living now with contractual access to assisted living and skilled nursing later, on the same campus, without having to move house again during a crisis.

Established communities in and near the area include Channing House, Moldaw Residences, Webster House, and Vi at Palo Alto; The Forum at Rancho San Antonio and Sunny View in Cupertino; The Terraces at Los Altos; The Terraces of Los Gatos and Los Gatos Meadows; Saratoga Retirement Community; The Peninsula Regent and The Stratford in San Mateo; and The Sequoias in Portola Valley.

Three things to understand before you tour any of them:

Contract type drives everything. A Type A or life care contract has the highest entrance fee but holds your monthly fee largely steady even as your care needs increase. Type B includes a defined amount of care and then charges beyond it. Type C is fee-for-service, cheapest to enter and most exposed later. Some communities also offer straight month-to-month rental with no entrance fee at all.
Entrance fees vary enormously and aren't published. CANHR puts the California range at roughly $100,000 to well over $1,000,000, and Bay Area communities cluster at the upper end of that. Refundability tiers, commonly around 0%, 50%, or 90% refundable, push the number up as the refund percentage rises. You'll have to call for real figures.
Read the financials. These are regulated by the California Department of Social Services, which reviews each provider's financial feasibility but is explicit that its approval isn't an endorsement or a guarantee. Every provider files an annual report you can request, and CANHR publishes a free guide to reading them. Do this. You're prepaying for decades of future care from a single organization, and its balance sheet is your risk.

Independent and assisted living, rented month to month

If a large entrance fee doesn't make sense, rental senior communities are widespread across the South Bay and Peninsula. What they cost depends on who you ask, and the sources genuinely disagree, so here's both.

Source	Assisted living, monthly	Independent living, monthly
CareScout Cost of Care Survey 2025 (published March 2026), California median	$7,000	Not surveyed
A Place for Mom, San Jose area averages (updated September 2026)	About $7,482	About $5,000

The first is survey data and the second is referral-network pricing, which is why they don't match. Either way, the San Jose area runs roughly 20% above the California average and well above the national one. The useful planning point is that a house sale here often funds a great many years of this, and running that arithmetic honestly tends to be more reassuring than people expect.

Leaving the area

Plenty of people do it, usually toward children in another state, or toward Sacramento, the foothills, the Central Coast, or the desert. Two cautions. The first is the Proposition 19 state line issue above, which is a permanent, quantifiable annual cost of leaving California that deserves to be on the spreadsheet. The second is softer but I've seen it more often: people move to be near adult children whose jobs then relocate them, and they end up starting over at 78 in a town where they know nobody. If the move is driven by family proximity, have the honest conversation about how likely that family is to stay put. I've written separately about where Bay Area homeowners actually move to and what leaving the Bay Area really involves.

Moving in with family, and ADUs

Multigenerational living is more common here than the national numbers suggest, and California's ADU rules have made the backyard cottage a realistic option. A junior ADU has to sit within the walls of the existing house and stay under 500 square feet, while a detached ADU is its own structure. State law now overrides most local resistance to building one.

Two practical notes. Building an ADU triggers a partial reassessment on the new construction at market value, though your existing Proposition 13 base on the main house is untouched. And simply moving in with a child changes nothing about property taxes on its own, because only a transfer of title implicates Proposition 19. Check current rules with your city's planning department, since ADU law has been amended repeatedly and keeps moving.

Common questions

What does a real estate downsizing specialist in the Bay Area actually do differently?

The transaction mechanics are the same as any sale. What's different is everything around it: coordinating the Proposition 19 filing so it isn't missed, sequencing the belongings work so the listing date is realistic, structuring the offer terms so you're not homeless at close of escrow, knowing which senior move managers and estate sale companies do good work, and being willing to spend a year on a move rather than six weeks. A conventional listing agent is measured on days to contract. This work is measured on whether you land somewhere you're glad to be. There's a longer version of how I work with senior homeowners if you want it.

Do I have to be 55 to transfer my property tax base?

You have to be over 55 at the time you sell the original home. The age is tested at the sale date, not the purchase date of the new home, so if you're close to the birthday the calendar matters a great deal.

Can I use Proposition 19 more than once?

Yes, up to three times in your lifetime if you qualify by age or disability. Victims of wildfire and declared disasters aren't subject to that limit.

What if my new home costs more than the one I sold?

You can still transfer. Only the amount above the threshold, which is 100% of the original home's market value if you buy before selling, 105% in the first year after, and 110% in the second year, gets added to your transferred assessed value. Buying up usually still saves a great deal of money.

Do I need to sell before I buy?

No, and buying first is often better. Proposition 19 allows either order as long as the two transactions are within two years of each other, and buying first gets you the more favorable 100% threshold. The constraint is financing, which is why a home equity line set up before you list is worth considering.

How long should I expect the whole thing to take?

Plan on nine to eighteen months from first conversation to settled in the new place. The sale itself takes weeks. The belongings, the family conversations, the touring, and the waiting list at a continuing care community are what set the pace.

What happens to everything we don't want?

Family first, then an estate sale if there's enough volume to justify one, then donation, then hauling. Get an appraiser or an estate sale professional to look at the contents before anything leaves, because the things that hold value aren't always the things you'd guess.

Is it cheaper to stay and renovate?

Sometimes, particularly if the house has room for a ground-floor primary suite and you want to stay in the neighborhood. Staying also keeps your existing tax base without using up a Proposition 19 transfer. It stops making sense when the lot or the floor plan means you'd renovate into the same problem.

Do you work with families where the homeowner's children are handling things?

Often. A good share of my work starts with a phone call from an adult child in Seattle or Denver who's worried about a parent in San Jose. I work with trustees, powers of attorney, professional fiduciaries, and elder law attorneys regularly, and I'm an affiliate member of the Professional Fiduciary Association of California.

Let's talk about your situation

I'm Seb Frey, a broker associate with Compass in Los Gatos and a senior downsizing realtor serving the Bay Area. I've been licensed since 2003, I've closed more than 450 transactions across Silicon Valley, and I hold the SRES and CSA designations. Most of my work now is with homeowners over 60 and the families helping them, and my senior resource guide collects everything else I've written for this group.

There's no cost to a first conversation and no obligation attached to it. If what you need is the name of a good senior move manager or a second opinion on whether to renovate instead of sell, I'll give you that and you'll never hear a pitch.

Call or text 408-413-3087 Send a message

Last reviewed September 2026. This page is general information about California property tax and real estate practice, not tax or legal advice. Property tax rules change, county procedures vary, and your own circumstances govern. Confirm Proposition 19 questions with the county assessor where your replacement home is located, and talk to a CPA or estate attorney before you act on anything here. Seb Frey, Broker Associate, Compass, CA DRE# 01369847.

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