On September 1, Trumark Homes broke ground on The Trails at Bishop Ranch, a project that will eventually put 67 single-family houses and 128 townhomes on land that used to be office parking, just steps from company headquarters at 3001 Bishop Drive. Pricing isn't set yet. The sales launch is planned for fall 2027. It's one groundbreaking in a neighborhood that has had several since 2022, part of Sunset Development's plan to eventually add more than 8,400 homes inside a former office park most of the Bay Area still thinks of as Chevron's old campus.
If you've been watching San Ramon from outside, the obvious read is that all this new supply should be pulling prices down across the city. More homes, more competition for buyers, softer numbers everywhere.
That isn't what the data for the three months ending June 2026 shows. In Central San Ramon, the median sale price rose 6.8% year over year to $1.4 million, and the median price per square foot climbed 12.5% to $894. Homes there sold in a median of 20 days, up from 14 the year before, but still fast for anything this side of a $1 million home. Over that same three-month window, the city as a whole posted a median of $1.6 million and $741 per square foot, up a modest 0.5% year over year.
Two numbers moving in opposite directions inside the same city is the part worth sitting with if you're comparing San Ramon to Danville, Dublin, or Pleasanton and trying to work out what the construction boom actually means for what you're about to buy.
The Pipeline Is Real, and It's Large
Start with scale, because the numbers involved are big enough that some skepticism is fair. As of reporting on Bishop Ranch's redevelopment earlier this year, 367 housing units there have been completed, mostly by senior living operator Belmont Village and builder SummerHill Homes. Another 1,055 are under construction, and the city has approved 4,547 more. Sunset president Alex Mehran Jr. has said the full build out, spread across roughly two decades, could reach 8,421 homes.
Layer on top of that Sunset's separate approval this spring for The Orchards, the 92-acre site that used to be Chevron's own corporate campus before the company shifted its headquarters to Houston in 2024. San Ramon's City Council voted unanimously in April to let Sunset build 2,600 homes there, plus 125,000 square feet of retail designed to read differently from the existing City Center mall, more like San Jose's Santana Row, with ground-floor shops beneath housing rather than a standalone shopping center.
None of that is speculative. It's zoned, funded, and in several cases already under construction. The Trails sits inside that pipeline. So does City Village, SummerHill's earlier project a short walk from City Center. When SummerHill opened City Village's first phases, it sold more than $70 million in townhomes and detached homes, and roughly 80% of those early buyers were first-time purchasers, many of whom had been renting in San Francisco. The remaining 20% split between empty nesters downsizing from elsewhere in the East Bay and buyers picking up a second home.
Why Two Numbers Can Both Be True
That buyer breakdown is the detail that explains the divergence. New construction at Bishop Ranch is drawing heavily from people who weren't previously bidding on resale homes in San Ramon at all. A renter leaving San Francisco for a first home isn't the same buyer competing for a three-bedroom resale in Norris Canyon or Vista San Ramon. That's a separate funnel feeding a separate price.
SummerHill also runs its own front door on that funnel. Buyers at City Village have to get pre-approved through one of the builder's preferred lenders before they can even write a purchase agreement. Pair that gate with the interest list SummerHill had built before releasing its third collection, more than 3,700 names before The Rows even went on sale, and the process looks more like a waitlist than an open market. It absorbs its own demand instead of pulling buyers away from whatever's sitting on the resale market a few miles away.
Mehran has described the broader redevelopment in similar terms, telling one interviewer the site is "an exciting place that changes day by day." That's a builder talking about his own project, but the underlying claim, that new construction here is additive rather than competitive with the rest of San Ramon, holds up against the price data so far.
What Each Segment Actually Gets You
| Central San Ramon resale | Bishop Ranch new construction | |
|---|---|---|
| Median price, 3 mo. ending June 2026 | $1.4M | Townhomes from $1.1M; detached homes have started around $1.5M to $1.75M depending on release |
| Price per sq ft trend | Up 12.5% year over year | Set by builder per release phase, not market-driven |
| Typical time to close | 20 days on market | Builder release calendar, not MLS timing |
| HOA | Varies by community, generally lower | $121 to $140 a month for detached product, $373 to $410 for attached townhomes at buildout |
| Buyer profile | Move-up and relocating families competing for existing stock | Roughly 80% first-time buyers, many former San Francisco renters; the rest downsizers or second-home buyers |
The HOA spread inside a single development is its own small lesson. At City Village, the detached Rows and Courts run $121 to $140 a month at buildout, while the attached Towns run $373 to $410. Same builder, same 31 acres, different ongoing cost because attached townhomes carry more shared structure to maintain. If you're weighing new construction against resale, that monthly number belongs in the comparison as much as the sticker price does.
What It Means If You're Comparing Cities
If you're deciding between San Ramon and a neighboring Tri-Valley city based on a citywide median you saw somewhere, that number is doing less work than it looks like. San Ramon's $1.6 million median for the three months ending June 2026 blends a fast-appreciating established core with a large, separately priced new-construction segment that behaves more like a builder's release schedule than an open resale market. Comparing that blended figure against Danville's or Pleasanton's citywide median treats two different kinds of markets as if they were one instrument.
The practical version: if what you want is an established neighborhood with mature landscaping and a resale process where you can negotiate against comparable closed sales, look at Central San Ramon's numbers on their own rather than the citywide figure most portals lead with. If what you want is new construction with a builder warranty and a fixed release price, the Bishop Ranch pipeline is going to keep expanding for roughly two decades, so there's little reason to rush a specific release the way you might for a resale listing that could be gone tomorrow.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Compare
Will 8,400 new homes eventually cool the whole city's prices? No one following this market can promise two decades of construction won't eventually change San Ramon's supply picture at the margins. But the segment that's grown fastest so far, Central San Ramon resale, is the one furthest removed from where the new units are landing. The mechanism driving new construction sales, first-time buyers leaving San Francisco rentals, is a different pool than the one bidding on an established resale home, and that gap is what's kept the two prices moving apart rather than together.
Should I wait for The Orchards to release before buying in San Ramon? The Orchards was approved in April 2026 for a build out its developer describes as unfolding over roughly two decades. If your timeline is measured in months rather than years, the current pipeline, projects like The Trails, City Village, and Deerwood Heights, is your near-term new-construction option. The Orchards is a longer horizon than most buyers are working with.
Does the new construction wave affect what I can get for an existing San Ramon home? Based on the three months ending June 2026, there's no evidence of that yet. Central San Ramon's price per square foot moved up, not down, over the same window that Bishop Ranch construction accelerated.
The Bottom Line
San Ramon's headline median is a blend of two markets that don't compete with each other the way the obvious story suggests. One is an established resale core where prices per square foot rose by double digits over the past year. The other is a multi-decade construction pipeline selling largely to first-time buyers leaving San Francisco rentals. Reading the city as a single market will get the comparison wrong every time.
If you're trying to work out what a specific San Ramon neighborhood, resale or new construction, actually means for your numbers, that's a read that benefits from someone tracking both segments closely rather than one citywide average. Linda Traurig works the Tri-Valley resale and relocation side of exactly this kind of comparison. Get Your Instant Home Valuation to see where your San Ramon home sits against the segment it's actually competing in.
