Kathy Fitzgerald Sherman was only half joking when she attributed her real estate hot streak to a series of “dumb luck.”

In the late 1980s, she and her husband were able to purchase a five-bedroom house in Mountain View, California, despite having a lower bid than a foreign investor, she said, simply because their 3-month-old son, Sam, had charmed the seller during the open house.

The next stroke of good fortune: Google and the ensuing tech boom moved into the neighborhood several years later.

“There was no way to predict that our $500,000 house would end up being a $2 million house,” said her husband, Michael Sherman, 68. “It’s not like we were smart about that. It’s just we were here.”

Michael Sherman, a director at the Toyota Research Institute, and Kathy Sherman, a retired lawyer,

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