We Buy Houses in Tomales, CA

Age is the first issue. Many of the village houses are more than a century old, some on post-and-pier or unreinforced foundations, and many have been added onto by several generations without a permit trail. An appraiser cannot count unpermitted square footage, and an inspection that turns up a failing foundation, knob-and-tube wiring or a rotted sill usually ends a financed sale or forces a price cut late in escrow. We buy those houses with the problems disclosed and priced, and the seller does not need to repair anything first.

Tomales is one of the few west Marin villages with its own sewer. The Tomales Village Community Services District, formed in 1998 when the community split away from North Marin Water District, runs the treatment plant that serves about one hundred homes, a handful of businesses and the Shoreline Unified schools. Parcels on the edge of the village and on the surrounding ranch land are on private septic and often private wells. When a sale involves an out-of-district parcel with an undersized or undocumented system, a lender may require repair or replacement first, and on a rural lot that can be expensive. The district boundary therefore matters to a sale, and we check it early.

The ranch ground around the village is a separate market. Grazing parcels and former dairies with milk barns, loafing sheds and hay barns are appraised and financed differently from houses, many carry agricultural zoning and some are under Williamson Act contracts that transfer to the new owner. The pool of buyers who can pay cash for a former dairy outside Tomales is small, and families who inherit one often live far away and have no use for it.

Tomales is also close to the San Andreas Fault, which runs down the length of Tomales Bay a few miles to the west. The 1906 earthquake destroyed the village's stone Catholic church, finished only five years earlier, and its effects are still visible in one of the old cemeteries. This does not make any particular house a bad buy. It does make earthquake coverage and structural disclosure more significant for the old brick and stone buildings in town.

Few properties change hands in Tomales in a given year. The village is small, and its 1860s through 1920s houses vary so much in size, lot and condition that an appraiser often has to use comparable sales from Petaluma's rural fringe or from other west Marin villages. A well-kept house within the sewer district with clean permits can still sell well through an agent, because buyers who want an old Marin village within commuting distance of Petaluma and Santa Rosa do come looking. Where the house needs a foundation, sits outside the district on a failing septic, or is a farmhouse on agricultural land, the financed buyers drop away quickly.

Owners selling in Tomales tend to be in a few situations. Some are heirs settling the estate of a parent who lived in the same house for decades. Some are ranch families letting go of a home site or a piece of ground once the dairy has closed. Others are landlords whose tenants have moved out after years, leaving a house that needs a full renovation before any lender would finance it. Each case is priced on its own facts.

Location helps. Tomales sits where Highway 1 meets the Tomales–Petaluma Road and Dillon Beach Road, so it is the service center for Dillon Beach, Lawson's Landing and the ranches between the Estero San Antonio and Walker Creek. That keeps a steady, if small, demand for village houses even when the rural parcels around it are hard to sell.