Your Home Might Appreciate Faster If You Live Near These Stores

For the most part, people enjoy living where there are nearby amenities—we want our fancy groceries and coffee. And a recent report from Zillow reveals as much. According to the report, homes appreciate faster when there’s a Starbucks, Whole Foods, or Trader Joe’s nearby.

Zillow analyzed millions of homes over a 17-year span, factoring in vicinity, median home values, store opening dates and more to come up with their data. The full findings were published in Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate, but Zillow released some of this data in a press release. A few interesting findings:

• Trader Joe’s: Homes near a future Trader Joe’s location appreciated at about the same rate as other homes in the same city. But once the store opened, they found a substantial increase. “Two years after a Trader Joe’s opened, the median home within a mile of the store had appreciated 10 percentage points more than homes in the city as a whole over the previous year.”
• Whole Foods: Interestingly, they found that homes near a future Whole Foods store appreciate more slowly than other homes before the store opens. But in the months leading up to an opening, the trend flips and those homes start appreciating more quickly. According to Zillow, by the end of 2014, homes that were within a mile of either Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s were worth more than double the median home in the rest of the country.
• Starbucks: According to the Guardian, Zillow also found that homes near a Starbucks appreciated 96% between 1997 and 2014, compared with the average of 65% for overall homes in the US in that time.

Of course, the old correlation vs. causation argument can be made here. Or, as The Guardian puts it: “which came first, Starbucks or higher real estate prices?” But Stan Humphries, Zillow’s Chief Economist makes an interesting point about the findings as a whole:

...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,” said Zillow Group Chief Economist Stan Humphries. “Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the stores may actually drive home prices. 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.

Either way, the data shows how much grocery stores and home values are related. For more detail, check out the link below.

Homes Near Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods Stores Appreciate Faster | Zillow via Business Insider

Photo by Garry Knight.

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