School quality is tied home prices in new study. But other factors may affect values.
It’s a key question for many home buyers who have or plan to have young children: We want a house in an area with good schools, but what sort of price premium — if any — will we have to pay?
Academic research studies in recent decades generally have found that, all other factors being held equal, you pay somewhat more for houses in highly rated school districts compared with homes in neighborhoods where the schools have lower ratings and test results.
Now a national realty brokerage, Redfin, has come out with a study that purports to put hard numbers on the pricing differential. Using a huge database of about 407,000 home sales and nearly 11,000 elementary school districts in 57 metropolitan markets, the study concluded that, on average, buyers pay $50 more per square foot for homes in top-rated school districts compared with homes served by average-rated schools. The study’s data came from multiple listing services plus school characteristics and test scores provided by the research firms GreatSchools and Onboard Informatics.
The net result, according to Redfin, is that the price differential for similar homes —