Increase Home Prices in Your Neighborhood

Locally-owned grocery stores in Detroit are upset, according to WTOP. Whole Foods is opening a store downtown after receiving tax breaks and real estate incentives never offered to the locally-owned stores.
     The counterarguments are that Whole Foods needed such incentives to build in a neighborhood this economically depressed and an upscale grocery store will increase residential property values in the neighborhood. Evidence for that second point comes from a report titled “An Assessment of the Marginal Impact of Urban Amenities on Residential Pricing” published by land use economics consultancy Johnson Gardner.
     However, what could be overlooked is that the analyses in the report also indicate how the proper mix of locally-owned stores can increase real estate values, especially in urban areas. Here are tips based on the evidence in that report and academic consumer psychology research:

• Encourage variety among the merchants and locate related store types together. When there is more retail shopping convenience, people are willing to pay more to live around there.
• Include stores where people will want to dwell. Cafés, dress shops, hardware stores, and book shops are examples. But any store appealing to a specialty interest and staffed by experts can increase dwell time. In the Johnson Gardner research, wine shops were particularly effective in improving residential property values nearby.
• Make a place for placemaking. Outside the stores themselves, dwell time is enhanced by placemaking. This term refers to creating plazas where people can gather and decorative streets where they can stroll. Placemaking encourages outsiders to patronize the stores surrounding the plaza and walkways. It encourages locals to become more interested in staying around when spending their money. And for these and other reasons, property values climb.
• Encourage people to enjoy their residences and the local area. Stores carrying decorative arts for the home and yard also helped raise house and condo prices in the neighborhood, as did shops selling and repairing bicycles.
• Have billboards advertising prestige retailers from the local area or elsewhere. Economically disadvantaged areas, with land values that are relatively low, often have more billboards than do other neighborhoods. When the prestige of the area increases, property values increase. Featuring top-line retailers on billboards boosts the area’s prestige a bit. Those marquee merchants might believe that billboards in such a neighborhood would bring down their own prestige. Research at Hofstra University and Saint Louis University finds this concern to be largely unfounded.

Click below for more:
Dress Up Your Neighborhood
Perpetuate Beautiful Days in Your Neighborhood
Attend to Context When Advertising