St Louis County Property Values and WalkScore.com


Yesterday, St. Louis county announced they had updated their online property database and that the overall property values for the county is down 9% from 2008 to 2009. So, of course, I had to check it out and see what the new numbers looked like. Well, we currently still own two homes in St Louis county, and both of our homes saw their values go up from 2008 to 2009! For our new house that was understandable since we upgraded it substantially since we first purchased it in 2008 with a major kitchen renovation which the county inspected (so they knew all about it.) We saw the value on that house increase almost 11%. However, the house we are in the middle of selling has not been substantially improved for several years (when we added a sunroom the county also already knew about) and it went up by 5%. So why did this happen? I thought with prices supposedly going down it should have gone down or at least stayed about the same.

But then I realized the 9% number is for the county as a whole, and I can imagine the distribution of where house prices are going down is not very uniform. The high number of foreclosures in St. Louis County are concentrated primarily in North County and that is where property values are dropping the most. If you look at the foreclosure numbers by municipality, it is easy to see that there are just a small subset of places with foreclosure rates over 0.2%, whereas the vast majority of municipalities have rates of 0.1% or lower (including the two municipalities where our homes reside.) The two school districts in question, Pattonville and Ladue also have lower school tax rates than average (Ladue's is the second lowest in the county, beaten only by Brentwood), so even if they must increase tax rates slightly to meet their budgets they should not be too burdensome on homeowners. So the "9% decrease" headline may not be as dour for all people as the number would imply.

Another neat website I found while checking the numbers on zillow.com was walkscore.com which Zillow now uses. This is a neat site which measures how walkable any address is to the businesses and closest local amenities. Just within the St. Louis county area the "walkability" score varies substantially. Our old house scored 31 (car dependent) whereas our new house scores 60 (somewhat walkable). For comparison I entered 6515 Wydown (dorms on the South 40) here on campus and it came up as 72 (very walkable) and the Greenway apartments just off the Delmar Loop came in at a staggering 91 (Walker's Paradise). It is a pretty informative site.

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