Hayward Park

Hayward Park lies between El Camino Real and the railroad, just south of Downtown San Mateo, with its own Caltrain station at the Concar Drive end. On the MLS it runs from about Fifth Avenue down to Seventeenth. Neighbors tend to mean the blocks south of Tenth and call the condominium buildings north of it downtown. Either way, it is a mix the rest of west San Mateo is not: streets of Craftsman, Tudor and Mediterranean houses from the 1910s and 1920s, and, toward El Camino Real and the station, condominiums and townhouses from every decade since. That is why it has the widest range of prices on this side of town, and why so many buyers find their first house here.

The name is Alvinza Hayward's. The mining millionaire's estate, Hayward Park, covered some 800 acres here from 1880, with a lake, a race track and a deer paddock. The deer paddock became the neighborhood: Baldwin & Howell were selling its lots by 1907, and the oldest houses on these streets date from before the First World War. The mansion itself became the Peninsula Hotel and burned in 1920. The Glazenwood tract next door, now San Mateo's one residential historic district, was built on the rest of the estate in the three years after the fire. The railroad gave its station the estate's name, and the name stuck to both.

By the county's count the neighborhood has about 480 single-family houses, more than 500 condominiums and townhouses, and a good number of duplexes. The houses are the old part: Craftsman bungalows from before the First World War, then the Tudor, Mediterranean and English-cottage styles of the 1920s, mostly two and three bedrooms on lots of 4,500 to 7,500 square feet. The condominium buildings date from the 1960s to the 2000s and cluster toward El Camino Real, the station and downtown.

A Hayward Park house sells for around $2.5 million, with the best streets, Fifteenth and Palm among them, reaching $3.7 million. That is a step below Baywood and Aragon next door, which is why buyers looking for their first house on the west side start here. The condominiums are a separate market. Most of the buildings sit north of Tenth Avenue by the station and downtown, and over the past two years they have sold for $575,000 to $2.8 million, typically around $1.3 million and often within two weeks of listing. The weekly San Mateo home-sales posts on this site carry the latest sales.

Downtown San Mateo begins where the neighborhood ends, so Third and Fourth Avenues, the library and Central Park are all a walk. The Hayward Park Caltrain station at Leslie Street puts a commuter on a train without touching a car. The public schools are Sunnybrae Elementary, Borel Middle and Aragon High.

Photographs by Mliu92, Mike Linksvayer, Evan0512 and Pi.1415926535 via Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY 2.0 and CC BY-SA 3.0. The 1906 postcard is in the public domain.

Ed's record here is mostly the condominiums at the downtown end. In 2000 he sold the lot at 222 Sixth Avenue, and when the building on it was finished he sold eleven of its homes between 2005 and 2009, the penthouse among them. He has sold at 555 Laurel Avenue four times since 1999. South of Tenth, he sold a townhouse on Barneson Avenue in 2016 and a house on Fifteenth Avenue in 2022. That is eighteen sales, more than in any San Mateo neighborhood except Downtown.