Ultimate Open House

From the Portland Tribune by Peter Korn 

You can call it the New Seasons Effect, or the Whole Foods Effect, but developers and city planners have talked about it for years. In short, nothing says you’ve arrived as a neighborhood quite so emphatically as a New Seasons specialty grocery store down the block.

And now there’s evidence showing how much that upscale grocery means to Portland-area property values – an extra 20 percent or so for homes within a block and a half, according to a study by local economic consulting firm Johnson Gardner.

Everything else being equal – same home, same neighborhood – if a specialty grocery store sits within a block and a half of your house, your property values should be 20 percent higher than if you don’t have the store nearby.

And specialty groceries aren’t even No. 1 on the list of shops that will elevate the value of nearby homes. That distinction belongs to small neighborhood movie theaters, according to the Johnson Gardner report.

All things being equal, a small movie theater can raise property values somewhere between 14 and 30 percent, according to the study. Wine bars and garden shops also provide a boon to homeowners. Bookstores, fitness centers and bike shops do the same, to a lesser extent.

Read the rest of the story at the portlandtribune.com.

Read more about the Johnson Gardner urban living study.