Premium supermarkets and Starbucks benefit house prices in the US

LOS ANGELES - Houses in the US that are located within a mile (1,5 km) of a premium supermarket as Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods Market can be up to twice as valuable as the average house in the same region but without supermarket proximity. The results were published by real estate experts Spencer Rascoff and Stan Humphries in the newest edition of Zillow Talk: Rewriting the Rules of Real Estate. Zillow is a real estate research group on the American market.

In the book Rascoff and Humphries analyze ten years of real estate statistics. The most important conclusion from the original edition of the book was that a house its proximity to a Starbucks location can raise its value significantly. In America this is called ‘ the Starbucks effect’.

In the latest edition of the book, both authors have applied the same principles to understand the effect of house values in regards to premium supermarket proximity. The conclusion is that houses that were located near a Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods Market, double in value between 1997 and 2014 compared to similar houses in other parts of the US.

Trader Joe’s is a subsidiary of Aldi Nord.