San Luis Obispo County's Real Estate Market:
San Luis Obispo is a city in California, located roughly midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the Central Coast. The city, referred to locally as SLO or "San Luis," is the county seat of San Luis Obispo County and is adjacent to California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly). As of the 2000 census, the city population was 44,174.
Because of San Luis Obispo's location halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, it has long been a stopping point for travelers. In fact, the word motel was coined here when the Motel Inn of San Luis Obispo was established in 1925. Since then, the pleasant year-round climate, pretty scenery, and well-preserved, walkable downtown have made the city a tourist destination in itself.
Although San Luis Obispo County has sustained enormous growth over the past two decades, San Luis Obispo itself has not because of a slow growth policy. That policy combined with the need for student housing related to the university and the climate that attracts new residents from around the world, have been among factors leading to skyrocketing housing prices. As of January 2006, 7% of San Luis Obispo's residents qualified to buy the median priced home.
Being a college town, a percentage of housing has become accustomed to student use which has, in effect, driven those neighborhoods' rents much higher than they might ordinarily fetch, due to demand. It has become a common practice for the affluent parents of wealthy students to buy a house for their child to live in while they attend college, and then sell it after the student graduates. The university is addressing the housing issue with the construction of new dormitories.
