Is your home worth as much as an Apple employee's?
Employees of the some of the country's top technology companies aren't only leaving behind other Americans in terms of their wealth -- they're also sprinting ahead of their fellow techies.
The typical worker in Apple's (AAPL) Cupertino, California, headquarters lives in a home that's worth $1.14 million, Zillow found in a new analysis. That's about $380,000 more than what a median home costs in the San Francisco metropolitan area and $241,000, or 27 percent, more than even higher-priced San Jose.
The median home value in the U.S. is just under $181,000, according to the real estate research firm. The median sales price of a new home in the U.S. is roughly $297,000. This means the average Apple employee's home is worth about six times that of the typical U.S. house, up from three times in 2010.
"The value gap between Silicon Valley techies' homes and their neighbors' homes has been widening recently, especially for Apple workers," Zillow concluded. That divide first began to widen after the tech giant's introduction of the iPhone in 2007, which boosted Apple's stock price and the wealth of employees.
Apple workers aren't the only ones seeing a surge in their home prices. The median home value among Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOG) employees is an even richer $1.25 million and $1.28 million, respectively, Zillow reported.
In conducting the study, Zillow used Census data to determine where a person lives and works. It then calculated a weighted average of home prices in the Census tracts where Apple, Facebook and Google are based.
Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Zillow, said the findings highlight the widening wealth gap between tech company employees and other U.S. workers.
It is no secret, of course, that Silicon Valley throws off enormous amounts of wealth. Less well known is that over the last 25 years, income inequality in the region has increased at a faster pace than in the U.S. as a whole, according to a recent study by the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.