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According to a recent analysis by Zillow, if you live near a Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, the value of your home could significantly go up in value. And specifically, if you live within a mile of either store, you home could be worth twice as much as the average home in the country.
But why?
Zillow’s Chief Economist, Stan Humphries says, “Like Starbucks, the stores have become an amenity in their own right – a signal to the home-buying public that the neighborhood they’re located in is desirable, perhaps up-and-coming, and definitely improving.”
But could these homes increase in value because people that can afford to spend more money on organic groceries want to live closer to their favorite grocery store and have the opportunity to walk to places such as coffee shops, libraries, and beautiful parks? Perhaps.
Zillow’s CEO, Spencer Rascoff, wrote a book, Zillow Talk, about the grocery store phenomenon. He states,
“It says something about the way people want to live – in the type of neighborhood favored by the generations buying homes now. Today’s homebuyers seek things in neighborhoods that weren’t even in real estate agents’ vocabularies a generation ago: walkability, community, new urbanism – and maybe we should add words like sustainable seafood and organic pears.”
And Humphries attests that two years after a Trader Joe’s opens in an area, the values of homes within a one mile radius go up 10 percentage points than other homes in the city. Humphries states, “Even if they open in neighborhoods where home prices have lagged those in the wider city, they start to outperform the city overall once the stores arrive.”
Want to learn more? Get Spencer Rascoff’s book, Zillow Talk.
Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate, $13.20
[h/t: Business Insider]
