A buyer comparing Terra Linda and Peacock Gap pulls up two Redfin tabs, does the math on price per square foot, and concludes Peacock Gap costs something like 40 to 60 percent more to live in. A reasonable read, given the numbers on the screen. Except if that same buyer refreshes those tabs a few months later, the gap has moved again, sometimes by a wide margin, and not because either neighborhood got meaningfully more or less desirable in the interim.
That instability is not a data error. It is the actual shape of these two markets, and understanding why changes what you should be pricing in before you write an offer in either one.
Two Neighborhoods, Several Different "Current" Prices
Terra Linda and Peacock Gap sit on opposite ends of San Rafael's price spectrum. Terra Linda is the city's mid-century flats, built out with Eichler and Eichler-adjacent tracts through the late 1950s and 1960s. Peacock Gap is the bayside pocket on the San Pedro Peninsula, developed mostly between 1961 and 1989 around a golf course and a lagoon.
Here is what makes both markets hard to read from a portal snapshot. Redfin's own neighborhood page for Terra Linda showed a median sale price of $1.1 million for July 2025, with price per square foot at $577, down 24.6 percent year over year. A later pull of that same page, reflecting March 2026 activity, put the median at $682,500, up 26.4 percent year over year. Movoto's data, sampled in October 2025, showed a median list price of $609,000 at $507 per square foot. Three sources, three different months, all describing the same handful of streets.
Peacock Gap tells the same kind of story at a higher price point. A Redfin pull reflecting May 2025 sales recorded a median of $2.3 million, up 37.5 percent year over year, with price per square foot at $826. A later pull, reflecting January 2026 sales, showed $1,520,000, down slightly year over year. Homes.com's trailing-twelve-month figure, which the site never timestamps beyond "last 12 months," has read $2,175,000 in one pull, $1,775,000 in another, and $2,049,500 in a third. There is no way to know from the page itself which twelve months any of those numbers actually cover.
None of these numbers are wrong exactly. They are each accurate descriptions of a different, narrow window of time in a market that does not trade very often.
Why a Thin Market Breaks the Median
Redfin counted 37 home sales in Terra Linda for July 2025, all property types combined. Peacock Gap saw 13 sales in May 2025. Those are not small counts by accident. When a market moving that few homes a month closes even one large estate sale or one distressed fixer, the median jumps or drops in a way that has nothing to do with the neighborhood getting more or less valuable. It has to do with which specific houses happened to close.
Compare that to a deep market like the citywide San Rafael figure, where February 2026 sales of 41 homes still produced a median described as up 24.9 percent year over year even as the broader per-square-foot figure fell 14.3 percent over the same period. Those two numbers moving in opposite directions inside the same city, in the same month, is the same phenomenon at a slightly larger scale: mix matters more than trend when sample sizes are small.
The practical takeaway is not that Terra Linda or Peacock Gap prices are meaningless. It is that a single month's median, pulled from a listing site, tells you almost nothing about what a specific house should sell for. It tells you what a few other houses happened to sell for. Anyone using that number to anchor an offer is measuring the wrong thing.
The Line Item That Doesn't Move: Radiant Heat
If the median in Terra Linda is unreliable, what should a buyer actually price in? The answer sits under the floor of a large share of the neighborhood's housing stock.
An estimate cited by SFGate puts the number of Eichler homes in San Rafael at roughly 1,500, concentrated mainly in Terra Linda and in Lucas Valley-Marinwood. The Lucas Valley Homeowners Association describes Upper Lucas Valley as predominantly Eichler, with more than 500 single-family homes. One well-documented tract, Terra Linda South, consists of 220 homes built between 1958 and 1960 by the architecture firms Anshen and Allen and Jones and Emmons, clustered around Golden Hinde Boulevard and Devon Drive.
Nearly every original Eichler in these tracts was built with in-floor hydronic radiant heat, hot water running through pipes embedded in the concrete slab. It is, by most accounts from people who live with it, a genuinely good heating system. Jim Lehmann, a third-generation Marin plumber whose company Lehmann Radiant Heating has worked on Eichler systems out of a Terra Linda home office since his grandfather founded the plumbing business in 1945, put it simply: "The radiant heat is a great heating system. When it works, it's hard to beat."
The catch is what happens when it does not work. Radiant systems fail in one of two ways: an in-slab leak or a failed boiler. A leak repair, if it is one or two isolated spots, can run a few thousand dollars or less. If the tubing is failing in multiple places, or if the original material was not copper, the more common recommendation is to abandon the radiant system entirely and convert to forced air or ductless mini-splits, a project that can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Specialists like American Leak Detection use infrared thermography to locate slab leaks without tearing up flooring, and firms like Abril Roofing address the related issue of Eichler's flat and low-pitched rooflines, where water intrusion at beam penetrations is a known failure point that experts recommend inspecting alongside the heating system itself. The general guidance from radiant specialists is to have the boiler and slab lines pressure tested every one to three years, a maintenance rhythm most buyers of conventional forced-air homes never think about.
None of this shows up in a per-square-foot figure. A Terra Linda listing at $577 per square foot and one at $507 per square foot might carry identical radiant systems in identical condition, or one might need a five-figure conversion the other does not. The portal number is silent on the one line item that actually varies house to house and holds its cost regardless of what the neighborhood median did last month.
What Peacock Gap Buyers Are Paying For Instead
Peacock Gap does not carry a comparable systemic maintenance question. Its housing stock, built later and in a wider range of styles from midcentury ranch to Mediterranean estate, does not share one dominant mechanical system the way Terra Linda's Eichlers do. What Peacock Gap buyers are pricing in is closer to amenity access than mechanical risk: the 140-acre Peacock Gap Golf Club with its 18-hole course, proximity to McNears Beach, and adjacency to the 1,514-acre China Camp State Park with its 15 miles of trails. The neighborhood's HOA also organizes recurring community events, including a summer block party and a fall anniversary celebration, which speaks to the kind of settled, single-access community it is. Point San Pedro Road is the only route in and out, connecting to downtown San Rafael and Highway 101 in a matter of minutes but also meaning there is no redundancy if that road is ever closed.
That is a different kind of due diligence than an Eichler inspection. It is less about a five-figure repair bill and more about confirming what you are actually buying access to, and whether the golf course view or lagoon frontage on a specific listing justifies the premium that listing carries relative to a comparable home a few streets back.
A Short Checklist Before You Write an Offer
- If the listing is an original or lightly updated Terra Linda Eichler, ask directly when the radiant system was last pressure tested and request any service records, not just a general disclosure that heat "works."
- Get an inspection scoped specifically for slab leak detection and roof condition at beam penetrations, not just a general home inspection. This is a different specialty than most general inspectors carry.
- Treat any portal-reported median or price per square foot for either neighborhood as a starting conversation, not a comparable. Ask for the actual closed comps from the last 60 to 90 days, not a rolling twelve-month average that can smear together very different market conditions.
- In Peacock Gap, weigh the amenity premium against your actual use of it. A golf course view is not the same value proposition to every buyer, and the single-road access is worth a moment's thought regardless of how much you golf.
FAQ
Is a Terra Linda Eichler with untouched original radiant heat a bad investment? Not inherently. Many owners maintain these systems for decades with periodic servicing, and buyers who understand the maintenance rhythm often find the comfort worth it. The risk is buying one with an undocumented history and assuming the low per-square-foot price reflects the true cost of ownership.
Why do different real estate sites show different medians for the same San Rafael neighborhood? Small monthly sales counts mean the mix of homes that happened to close in any given window can swing the median substantially, and different sites pull and label their data at different points in time. Neither figure is necessarily wrong. Both are describing a narrow slice of a thin market.
Does Peacock Gap have anything comparable to the Eichler radiant heat question? Not a single system shared across most of the neighborhood's housing stock. The more relevant due diligence there is amenity value and single-road access rather than a specific mechanical line item.
Numbers that move this much from one snapshot to the next are not something to resolve by staring at another portal. If you are weighing a Terra Linda Eichler against a Peacock Gap listing, or trying to figure out what a specific address is actually worth right now, Staal Real Estate can walk through the real comps and the real inspection questions with you. Schedule a consultation and get a read on the market that accounts for what the median can't tell you.
