The last houses Eichler built.

Joseph Eichler died in July 1974. Two developments were still under construction when he did: Los Arboles Addition in Palo Alto, and San Antonio Court here in Los Altos — nine houses on Parsons Way and Almond Avenue.

That makes Parsons Way something no other Los Altos street is. Fallen Leaf Park is late Eichler; this is the last of it. There is no tract after this one, in Los Altos or anywhere, which puts a hard floor under the supply that no market condition can move.

It also explains why the street reads differently from Fallen Leaf Park six years earlier. By 1974 the operation was a fraction of its early-sixties scale and the houses were being built in single-figure numbers, not by the hundred.

Fallen Leaf Park gets counted, mapped and written about because thirty-seven houses is enough to behave like a market. Parsons Way does not. Eight houses on one cul-de-sac produce so few transactions that in many years there is nothing to point at.

That matters practically. Owners here are routinely told a value derived from Fallen Leaf Park sales a mile away, or worse, from non-Eichler Los Altos houses of similar square footage. Neither is a comparable, and neither prices in what the 1974 date actually means.

With no recent sale on the street, an appraisal-style comparable grid does not work. What does work is building the value up from the parts: the tract-Eichler price per foot established across Fallen Leaf Park and the nearest Palo Alto and Mountain View tracts, adjusted for lot, for plan, for condition of the frame — and then for the two scarcity premiums this street carries and no other does.

The first is the ordinary one-of-eight premium. The second is the last-tract premium, which is not sentimental: for a certain buyer, owning one of the final houses Eichler built is the reason to buy, and that buyer is not shopping on price per square foot.

The buyer pool for a street this small is not price-sensitive in the ordinary way. They are waiting for a house, not shopping a market.

If you own on Parsons Way or Almond Avenue, there is a standing group of buyers who have asked us specifically about this street and would move on the right house without it ever being listed. We keep that list because it is short enough to keep.

That is not a reason to sell. It is a reason to know your number before you need it, which costs nothing.