Pasatiempo

Pasatiempo sits above Highway 17 between Santa Cruz and Scotts Valley, and it is one of the more unusual residential communities in California. Note first that it is unincorporated Santa Cruz County rather than part of the City of Santa Cruz, which affects services, taxes and school assignment. It is also a genuine census designated place, not a marketing label.

The community was founded by Marion Hollins in 1928 and 1929, and that is the detail that makes this place remarkable. Hollins was a national amateur golf champion and a formidable businesswoman who conceived Pasatiempo as a residential sporting estate and hired Alister MacKenzie, the architect who would go on to design Augusta National, to lay out the golf course. It opened in 1929 with an exhibition match featuring Bobby Jones, and it has been rated among the finest courses in the country ever since.

Very few residential communities anywhere in the United States were built around a nationally significant golf course, and fewer still were developed by a woman in the 1920s. The houses reflect that origin, with custom homes on winding lanes among oaks and open fairway views, and the whole place has an air of having been designed rather than subdivided.

The housing is detached single family throughout, largely custom, with few if any attached options. Terrain rolls, driveways can be long, and this is not a neighborhood with sidewalks or a flat walking loop. That is worth thinking through honestly if you are planning twenty years ahead rather than five, because there is nothing here to downsize into and a move generally means leaving.

What Pasatiempo offers in exchange is privacy, mature landscape and the golf course itself, which for a certain kind of retirement is the entire point. I have had clients who organized their whole week around a tee time here and would not have moved for anything.

Schools in this unincorporated area are served by area districts rather than by Santa Cruz City Schools, with assignment depending on the parcel, so I verify rather than assume. Cabrillo College in Aptos serves the wider county.

For services, Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz is roughly ten to fifteen minutes away, the Santa Cruz Public Libraries serve the county on one card, and the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County runs falls prevention and home repair programs for older residents. Scotts Valley with its senior center is a similar distance north.

Highway 17 is immediately at hand, which is the community’s great practical advantage, putting Los Gatos and San Jose twenty five to thirty five minutes away off peak. It is also a demanding road in rain and fog, and it closes for accidents. Santa Cruz METRO runs the Highway 17 Express commuter bus over the hill from downtown Santa Cruz.

On price, the typical Santa Cruz area home is running around $1.35 million as of late summer 2026, and Pasatiempo trades well above that. With few sales in any given year and houses that are genuinely individual, pricing a property here takes real comparable analysis rather than a median. My Santa Cruz home prices page tracks the wider market and the full Santa Cruz area guide covers the region.

Selling a distinctive property to a small, well advised buyer pool is a different exercise from selling a tract home, and it carries the larger tax consequences that come with long ownership and substantial appreciation. Between capital gains and what Proposition 19 now means for passing property to children, there is real planning to do. That is the work I handle for older adults and their families. Book a call with me for a candid conversation, or read about my selling process.