Sweet price for Winnie the Pooh’s tree house
Little bear’s tiny home would be modest sale in One Hundred Acre Wood
Movoto Real Estate, an online brokerage in more than 30 American states, provides fictional estimated values for renowned international properties — both real and imaginary. Standard real estate practices are used for the evaluations. Today we look at Winnie the Pooh’s tree house. With the approach of spring and end of hibernation season, we thought to focus on the home of a classic children’s book character: A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh.
The bear with the golden heart and sticky paws would be itching to get out of his tree house and go on an adventure.
We estimated Pooh Bear’s tree house would fetch a scant $13,273 on today’s Canadian market, not including all the empty “hunny” pots lying around. Pricing a fictional home To estimate the value of Pooh Bear’s tree house, we needed to know its size, its location and the price of similar properties in that place. Of these three, finding the size of the tree house proved as difficult as getting an overstuffed bear out of a tight rabbit hole. Atree house fit for a Pooh There have been several variations of Winnie the Pooh’s tree house through the years. One is a small room in a hollowed-out tree. A second, more elaborate, version is a tree growing on top of and around a diminutive house. For this evaluation, we chose the latter style.
According to an story in Britain’s Daily Mail, the toy bear that inspired Milne to create Pooh was 46 centimetres tall. (Full disclosure: We briefly considered using the London Zoo home of Winnie, the black bear named for the Winnipeg hometown of her rescuer, Capt. Harry Colebourn, and who zoo visitor Milne would have taken his son — Christopher — to see.)
Knowing the 46-centimetre size of the toy bear, we located numerous interior and exterior images of Pooh’s tree house and calculated measurements using the size of Pooh’s bed — which we assumed must be slightly longer than him — for reference. After mulling it over, we estimated that Pooh’s tree house was just 28.125 square feet, an absolutely tiny living area for a normal person, but not for the pint-sized bear. Which forest does Winnie the Pooh live in? Winnie the Pooh and the rest of his friends live in the Hundred Acre Wood, which is not — as much as we wanted it to be — a real place. That said, the Hundred Acre Wood is based on a real location: the Five Hundred Acre Wood in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex, England. What compares to a tree house? When we do fictional evaluations, we look for comparable properties that match not only the location but also the size of the fictional property. In this case, the best we could do was to use homes that were small, but not as compact as Pooh’s place. After looking at several one-bedroom bungalows in East Sussex, we calculated an average price per square foot of $471.93. Atiny home with lots of character Finally, we multiplied the $471.93 price per square foot by the home’s 28.125-square-foot size. We determined that, if put on the market today, Pooh’s house would have an estimated value of $13,273 — not quite the least-expensive property we’ve evaluated, but certainly close. If you’re looking to buy, however, there’s no sign of Pooh Bear leaving his home any time soon; there’s just too much honey to be had nearby. David J. Cross is writer and editor living in San Francisco, manages Movoto Real Estate’s blog. He can be reached at dcross@movoto.com.