If shopping at a new Hoboken Trader Joe’s isn’t exciting enough, what if I told you that a Hoboken Trader Joe’s can increase our real estate values by as much as 10% too?
If you believe some recent articles that have looked into the effect of home values when certain amenities such as a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods come into a neighborhood, then this just may be the case!
I for one am excited over the news simply because shopping at one of the nations’ best loved grocery chains will soon be just an easy walk from my home at Maxwell Place rather than a drive up River Road to Edgewater. Convenient? Absolutely!
As reported in the Hudson Reporter today, the store is planned for the ground floor of the 140-unit Advance Realty luxury residential development at Willow Avenue and 14th Street at the foot of the Viaduct.
Also, as a local real estate Broker Associate with Prominent Properties Sotheby’s International Realty, I was also curious as to how the news of this might affect real estate values. I was fascinated to read this recent article in Business Insider which quoted an analysis done in the new edition of Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff and Zillow Group Chief Economist Stan Humphries’ book Zillow Talk where Mr Humphries explains:
“Like a self-fulfilling prophecy, the stores may actually drive home prices,” Humphries said. “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.”
For example, the analysis found that 2 years after a new Trader Joe’s opened home values within one mile went up by 10 percentage points more than homes in the rest of the city.
“It says something about the way people want to live – in the type of neighborhood favored by the generations buying homes now,” Rascoff said.
“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.”
With Hoboken being essentially one square mile, that analysis pretty much covers the whole town as well as parts of Jersey City Heights, Union City and Weehawken!
Great news for home owners! Not a home owner yet, no problem. Search for your new Hoboken home here
Happy shopping either way!