Half the people at my Millbrae open house came from San Francisco. The other half drove up from the South Bay.
More than 30 groups came through. Almost nobody lived nearby.
That split surprised me more than anything about the house.
Why come north?
The San Francisco visitors made sense to me. Millbrae is one of the first cities people look at when they start looking south.
The South Bay visitors were the ones I wanted to hear from. So I asked what brought them north.
The answers varied. Some simply preferred the Peninsula weather. Others were thinking a step ahead: if their next job ended up in San Francisco, or somewhere farther north, they wanted a home that wouldn’t lock them out of it.
Nobody said they were leaving the South Bay behind. They were buying room to move.
Between, or the meeting point
The Peninsula usually gets described as the place between San Francisco and Silicon Valley — the stretch you drive through on the way to somewhere else.
That weekend, it looked more like the meeting point.
The house brought them in. The station kept coming up.
Millbrae is the one Peninsula station where BART and Caltrain meet. BART runs north into San Francisco. Caltrain runs south down the Peninsula toward Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. SFO is next door.
For a household where one person works in San Francisco and the other works in the South Bay, that geography matters.
From most places on the Peninsula, one commute wins and the other loses. Live close to the city and the South Bay drive gets long. Live close to the South Bay and the city gets far. Somebody takes the bad end of the deal, every day.
Millbrae doesn’t make either commute short. What it does is give both people a train — one north, one south — from the same station.
Two jobs, two directions
That’s why, with buyers, I like to map both commutes door to door before we start comparing houses.
Not the distance on a map. The real trip, at the hour you’d actually leave: the walk or drive to the station, whether there’s parking when you get there, the train, and the last stretch to the office. Then the same thing for the other person. Then the drive, for the days the train doesn’t work.
It changes the search more than any filter does.
Because for a two-job household, the house that wins on square footage can lose on the calendar. An extra bedroom doesn’t feel like much if it costs someone 40 minutes each way.
Your next job may not be in your current city
There’s another shift underneath all of this.
AI and tech companies have been taking more office space along the Peninsula again. In San Mateo County, AI companies leased more than 700,000 square feet in the first half of 2026, according to Cushman & Wakefield, and the county’s combined office and R&D vacancy fell to 21.1% in the second quarter. Newmark put AI companies at nearly 30% of the county’s leasing activity in Q2, up from about 13% a year earlier, as reported by the San Mateo Daily Journal.
To be clear, a market where more than a fifth of the space is still empty is not a tight one. But it adds another layer to the location decision. Tech careers move faster than homes do, and your next job may not be in the same city as your current one.
A house near a station hedges that bet. A house that only works for today’s commute doesn’t.
For sellers: look beyond the neighborhood
And for sellers, there’s another lesson:
Your next buyer may not live anywhere near you today.
At this open house, the people who came through were mostly from somewhere else — the city to the north or the South Bay to the south. They were weighing this house against homes in other cities, and they drove in to see it.
That changes how a home should be presented. The marketing has to reach beyond the local zip code. The listing should explain the location to someone who has never spent a Saturday in Millbrae — where the station is, how long the walk takes, what’s close by. And the open house should be ready for questions about commuting in both directions, not only about the kitchen.
What stayed with me
That was what stayed with me after this open house.
San Francisco coming south. South Bay coming north. And meeting in Millbrae.
If you’re a two-job household trying to find the place where both commutes work, tell me where each of you goes every morning. I’ll map both trips with you before we look at a single listing, and tell you honestly whether Millbrae is the answer — or whether a different stop is. There’s more on the city in my Millbrae guide, or call or text me at 650-866-9266.
Transit routes and schedules change; check current service with BART and Caltrain for your own trip. Office-market figures are from Cushman & Wakefield’s San Mateo County Office and R&D MarketBeat, Q2 2026, and from Newmark data as reported by the San Mateo Daily Journal; deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
