Walk Score: A Factor in Home Sales

Do you know your home's walk score?

With gas prices now hovering around $4 a gallon, the ability to walk to where you are going is getting more and more practical.

Walkscore.com has devised a clever way of ranking any address on its “walkability” and assigning a score based on the amenities available by foot.

Each point in your walk score may be worth $3,000 in home value. That’s pretty specific, but I’ve observed a higher price per square foot in the sales of homes in desirable Westside Danville over many other parts of town.

I looked up my address, and my neighborhood has a walk score of 34, which means I am “car-dependent.” 

No kidding, I could have told them that.

I once moved my car three times in the same parking lot. It was Alamo Plaza, where I need to visit , then the , then decided to park close to , so I could more easily load my groceries. 

It was all sound logic, and it is a vast parking lot, but I will never be sought after as the poster-walker for this new website.

While walking across isn’t that exciting (it’s a parking lot, after all), many of the strolls you can take from a “walkable” house are.

In Westside Danville, my new listing at 365 Glendora (see the virtual tour), has a walk score of 85. It's just 2 blocks to (k-5), a few more to , 2 blocks to the Iron Horse Trail and 3 blocks to all that charming downtown Danville has to offer.

Statistics show that Westside Danville has held values better than the rest of Danville and better than Alamo as a whole–people love the walk-to-town locations, the large flat lots, the proximity to the Iron Horse Trail.

As a subset of Danville, the sales data for the westside is the most positive. In 2010, 50 sales and a median sales price of $999,000. In 2009 there were 28 sales and a median sales price of $925,000.

With an increase in both volume and sales price, values hold in the westside of Danville because no one wants to move from such an ideal location.

The statistics gathered here are based on information from the Contra Costa Association of REALTOR’S® MLS. Display of MLS data is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed accurate by the MLS.