Walk Scores can lure home buyers
When Anu Sharma and her husband Vishwa Chandra were house hunting in San Francisco this spring, they would only consider neighborhoods with a Walk Score of 90 or above.
Walk Score is a company and scoring system that rates cities, neighborhoods and individual addresses on a 100-point scale based on their distance to places like grocery and retail stores, bars and restaurants, schools, parks, entertainment spots, banks and post offices.
Because of the way it’s constructed, it favors urban areas over suburban and rural ones, and its popularity has grown along with the preference for city living among many Millennials and empty-nesters.
“We have a car, but (almost) never use it,” said Sharma, who takes BART to her job with a health care startup in the East Bay. Her husband, a management consultant, travels four days a week and usually takes Uber to the airport.
Because he’s gone so much, “I need to be where something is sort of happening, not feeling like I’m stranded on an island somewhere,” Sharma said. She wants a lifestyle where she can walk the dog, meet up with a friend after work and get to know the neighbors. “If I just wanted a nice house,” she said, she’d move to the suburbs.
Sharma and Chandra, both 37, are waiting to close on a condo in Hayes Valley, where the Walk Score is 97.
Walk Score started just seven years ago, but its ratings have become a staple on real estate websites such as Redfin (which purchased Walk Score in 2014) and Zillow. These sites typically