The real estate website Zillow has come out with a rather interesting study.
According to Zillow, your local grocery market has a lot to do with what happens in your local housing market.
Specifically, Zillow found that homes near a Trader Joe's or Whole Foods grew more rapidly than homes that were not.
Between 1997 and 2014, homes near the two grocery chains were consistently worth more than the median U.S. home. And by the end of the year 2014, homes within one mile of either store was worth more than twice as much as the median home in the rest of the country. Zillow reached their conclusions after analyzing the value of millions of homes near dozens of Trader Joe's and Whole Foods.
"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," 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."
The results were published in a book titled "Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Read Estate."
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