You may consider your home to be in the ideal location. After all, it is close to family and your place of employment. Look a little closer, and you may find some hidden treasure.
Appraisers look at many factors when placing a value on your house. Things like its proximity to employment opportunities and good schools are essential. As we will discuss here, its distance away from restaurants, entertainment, and shopping can significantly raise the value of your home.
What are the benefits of having places of interest nearby? How is your property’s value related to walkability? Let’s take a look.
Walkability and Your Property’s Value
Before selling your home, you cannot know if your property’s value will depreciate or appreciate it over time. Please do all you can to increase the odds of it having a higher value. This process includes taking a look at what is within walking distance.
Beautiful views, excellent schools, and local parks nearby will help significantly nowadays. Millennials are less into driving and more into walking, and for a good reason. Walking has its health benefits, not only from exercise but from being out in the sunshine. Taking in the fresh air and being away from (and out of) heavy traffic negatively affects well-being.
Statin Island
Take the West Brighton neighborhood in Staten Island. Here you have a funky part of the North Shore attracting a lot of buyers. This situation is partly due to the high number of fantastic restaurants, like Randazzo’s Clam Bar, Bay Ridge tacos, and Ho’Brah, to name a few.
West Brighton is attracting a lot of artists and businesses. The rich culture and retail opportunities contribute to the rising property values.
Walkability Trend
All this renewed interest in urban real estate plays a huge part in the revitalization of several downtown neighborhoods.
Millennials want to bid farewell to those car payments. Trending toward living in urban areas, they prefer walking opportunities a bit more than previous generations. They are not necessarily against transportation. However, they do prefer ridesharing and mass transit over owning a car.
Millennials are not the only ones getting on the urban boogie train. Since the nightlife is more vibrant and property maintenance is much easier than owning a home in the suburbs, many other generations are doing the same if they can afford it. Realtors will be keen on what is nearby, within walking and biking distance, when selling your property.
Score Those Points
City planners are aware of the renewed interest in mixed-use areas, offering more “live-work-play” types of developments. This way, employees can walk down to the local restaurant or bar for their lunch breaks. Residents can stroll down to the store or local movie theater.
Even back in 2016, a walkability study was done, which was published by Redfin. It found that property value increased by $3,250 on average with each additional Walk Score point they received. Every area they studied seemed to show the same results, except for a couple of cities, like Las Vegas.
How Walkable is Your Neighborhood?
Homes within more walkable neighborhoods came out on top, raising the property’s value. Realtors have more to show you than just the home. They will tell you where you can get the best cup of freshly roasted coffee on your morning route.
Urban sprawl is more like an urban crawl now that people are more interested in moving their feet in the city. Because of this trend, you might have more value in your home than you previously assumed!
Contact us to talk about your property’s value. We will answer any questions you may have.
Wonica Realtors & Appraisers are Staten Island’s #1 independent full-service real estate firm, serving the community’s needs for over 30 years. Whether you are buying, selling, renting, or relocating, our staff of highly trained professionals will provide quality realty services with personal attention to your individual real estate needs.