Ever a fan of Freakonomics, my first thought was to do a longitudinal fact check on a home's prices before and after GreatSchools data integration with Zillow. While Zillow doesn't show estimate value history beyond the last 10 years, I found tax assessment values going back an extra decade or more on Zillow. The very very limited sampling I had shows that
(1) school rating integration did not have any immediate effect on home sale prices
(2) the 2008 financial crisis froze assessment values for a few years before there was an uptick in the assessed values again
(3) robust home price increases (by way of assessed value increases) did not happen until mid 2010s
What do these observations suggest? Many home buyers were already doing a lot of school and neighborhood researches on their own, so the GreatSchools data integration perhaps had little effect on home prices between different neighborhoods and school districts. But the rating integration certainly helped me with faster home searches (or rather, ruling-outs) in the early 2010s.
Ahhh, love this Gene. Thank you so much for sharing. I think your quick sampling is likely right on. Parents and neighborhoods were already self-sorting prior to the integration of school rankings (we'll talk about this more as the store of Where Success Lives unfolds), but the integration of school rankings has made it easier for parents to identify, classify and talk about with other parents, for better or worse. There is a lot of research that shows that good schools (or bad) *do* have significant impacts on home values. As one parent put it to me a few weeks ago, now it's just all much more front-and-center.
Ever a fan of Freakonomics, my first thought was to do a longitudinal fact check on a home's prices before and after GreatSchools data integration with Zillow. While Zillow doesn't show estimate value history beyond the last 10 years, I found tax assessment values going back an extra decade or more on Zillow. The very very limited sampling I had shows that
(1) school rating integration did not have any immediate effect on home sale prices
(2) the 2008 financial crisis froze assessment values for a few years before there was an uptick in the assessed values again
(3) robust home price increases (by way of assessed value increases) did not happen until mid 2010s
What do these observations suggest? Many home buyers were already doing a lot of school and neighborhood researches on their own, so the GreatSchools data integration perhaps had little effect on home prices between different neighborhoods and school districts. But the rating integration certainly helped me with faster home searches (or rather, ruling-outs) in the early 2010s.
Ahhh, love this Gene. Thank you so much for sharing. I think your quick sampling is likely right on. Parents and neighborhoods were already self-sorting prior to the integration of school rankings (we'll talk about this more as the store of Where Success Lives unfolds), but the integration of school rankings has made it easier for parents to identify, classify and talk about with other parents, for better or worse. There is a lot of research that shows that good schools (or bad) *do* have significant impacts on home values. As one parent put it to me a few weeks ago, now it's just all much more front-and-center.
It's mind-boggling (and totally fascinating) how you analyze this data, Rebecca. (Also, I went down a rabbit hole on GreatSchools 😬)
Haha, I love it! We're going to go down so many rabbit holes, I hope it's as fun for others as it is for me :)
I think this is important information and you're onto something. Keep going!
Thank you for your support! It means a lot xx