Santa Rosa
The county seat and our home base, it's the one place in the county that still has a real downtown office market. Top-tier space downtown has been leasing, a large purchase near the airport cut vacancy there, and Santa Rosa was the only city in the county to grow in 2025.
Four distinct inventories share the city limits. Downtown, Courthouse Square and Railroad Square hold older masonry and mixed-use stock, where a camera inspection of the sewer lateral is worth adding to almost any purchase. The north end, around the airport, Fountaingrove and Coffey Park, holds office, flex and light industrial space, some of it rebuilt after 2017. Older light industrial properties, retail, and hotels along Santa Rosa Avenue can often benefit from an infrared roof survey. The surrounding areas carry the 1970s to 1990s retail and office buildings now reaching the age where roof, HVAC and electrical all come due at once, which is exactly what a property condition assessment is built to sort into immediate repairs and reserves.
Petaluma, Rohnert Park, and Cotati
The south county is where the vacancy is, and therefore where much of the buying is. Petaluma gave back roughly 100,000 square feet of office occupancy over 2025, and its industrial pricing is under pressure. For a buyer that is opportunity, provided the discount is larger than the deferred maintenance, and a cost-to-remedy report can help with that.
Petaluma combines one of the region's best-preserved historic downtowns, with its iron-front and brick commercial buildings, and a working food processing and light industrial corridor along the river and the freeway. Rohnert Park and Cotati add retail centers, office parks and warehouses. Processing plants are a natural fit for air quality testing and electrical thermography, and the big warehouse and box store roofs for an infrared roof survey.
Windsor, Healdsburg, and Cloverdale
Hospitality, wineries and tasting rooms dominate Healdsburg and the Dry Creek and Alexander valleys, with retail and light industrial along Highway 101 from Windsor to Cloverdale.
Guest-facing property carries accessibility exposure that a warehouse never sees, and inns and hotels with rated corridors carry an annual fire door inspection obligation under NFPA 80. Winery production space, with its cool, damp barrel rooms and washdown floors, is hard on finishes and framing.
Sonoma Valley
The Valley of the Moon has a rich history. Its economy runs on wine and hospitality: wineries and tasting rooms from Kenwood to Sonoma, resort and spa property around Boyes Hot Springs, and the historic plaza in the town of Sonoma, lined with small retail and restaurant buildings, some of them nineteenth-century adobe and stone.
Tasting rooms and restaurants have constant traffic and accessibility is an important exposure to consider. Older inns and resorts carry fire door and water questions. Historic masonry and adobe need careful reading of cracks and past repairs.
West County & the Russian River
West County is its own place, economically and culturally: small towns with a bohemian streak and an economy that grew up around the Gravenstein apple. The processing plants, packing houses and cold storage that once anchored Sebastopol have mostly closed. Some have found new lives, such as The Barlow, built on the site of a former apple cannery and now home to food, wine and maker businesses. Others are old wood-frame and cold-storage buildings still looking for their next use.
Those buildings raise their own questions: refrigeration and electrical systems long past their design life, roofs and framing on structures that were never meant to be retail or hospitality, and site histories of fuel, chemical storage and refrigeration that deserve a Phase 1 ESA before a change of use.
Down on the river, water damage is rampant. Guerneville, Monte Rio, Forestville and the other river towns flood regularly. Much of the resort and commercial stock is older wood construction that has been flooded, dried and repaired more than once. The question on any purchase is what was dried properly and what was simply painted over, which is where air quality and mold testing comes in.