Arlington real estate prices getting close to Lexington, Winchester, Belmont

[MikePRU]

Originally Posted by johngolf

Mike

I think 2 to 3 times is a bit of a reach:

Traeger - *The Home Depot

http://www.curryhardware.com/wp-cont...-Ad_Page_2.jpg

I often shop my local ACE Hardware and 20 to 40% higher is the norm. Not 2 to 3 times.

I was exaggerating although the prices at Ace are noticeably higher than those at HD or Lowe's.

[3cents]

And now it seems that the higher end of Arlington is catching up to Winchester as well. E.g. 35 Scituate St closed at $70K above its asking price. Or perhaps this is a one-off thing, as it seems that it comes with the lot beside it.

[Brave Stranger]

Originally Posted by 3cents

And now it seems that the higher end of Arlington is catching up to Winchester as well. E.g. 35 Scituate St closed at $70K above its asking price. Or perhaps this is a one-off thing, as it seems that it comes with the lot beside it.

It comes with a spacious lot, but not with a separate, legal lot for another home to be built upon, from my understanding of this listing. The home sold for over 100k above asking price. It was listed on 4/11/16 for $839,000 & sold on 5/23/16 for $945,000.

Arlington real estate agents are routinely listing homes at lower prices and igniting bidding wars.....which seems to be a successful tactic judging from the final sales price vs. the original listing price, especially in the case of this house at 35 Scituate St. Almost every home & condo in Arlington this spring has sold over the listing price.

[semiurbanite]

Here is a cool tool to see housing prices on a map across the area. It's interesting how much difference there is across towns when you use price per square meter vs total property value. Weston is actually pretty cheap on a square meter basis.

The only cities that make it to the purple on the square meter metric are Boston Cambridge Brookline and Somerville, and then for some reason out in Concord you see some purple. Hit the "Layer" icon to change the metric.

http://madata1.maps.arcgis.com/apps/...c819ff8577b352

[jayrandom]

Originally Posted by semiurbanite

Here is a cool tool to see housing prices on a map across the area. It's interesting how much difference there is across towns when you use price per square meter vs total property value. Weston is actually pretty cheap on a square meter basis.

The only cities that make it to the purple on the square meter metric are Boston Cambridge Brookline and Somerville, and then for some reason out in Concord you see some purple. Hit the "Layer" icon to change the metric.

http://madata1.maps.arcgis.com/apps/...c819ff8577b352

That's pretty interesting. What I think would be really useful would be to look at price as a function a square footage. I suspect that extrapolating to a zero intercept (i.e. a 0 sq. ft house would cost $0) is a bad way of doing the comparison, but that's exactly what price/sq. ft does.

[semiurbanite]

Originally Posted by jayrandom

That's pretty interesting. What I think would be really useful would be to look at price as a function a square footage. I suspect that extrapolating to a zero intercept (i.e. a 0 sq. ft house would cost $0) is a bad way of doing the comparison, but that's exactly what price/sq. ft does.

How much would you pay for a 0 sqft house?

[jayrandom]

Originally Posted by semiurbanite

How much would you pay for a 0 sqft house?

It depends on the lot size and town regulations! If it's a buildable lot it definitely has nonzero value.

It was mentioned earlier in this thread, but extrapolating to zero intercept causes misleading conclusions. Arlington is more expensive per square foot than Lexington, for instance, but if you compare similarly sized houses, the one in Lexington is more expensive. The reason Arlington is more expensive per square foot is because smaller houses are more expensive per square foot and Arlington has smaller houses on average.

The same is true even within the same town. My old house was in a slightly less expensive part of Westwood, but it shows up as being the most expensive per square foot on your map because the average is so much smaller.

If you want to compare how expensive a town really is, price per square foot is better than nothing, but still deficient. You can get a sense by looking at a bunch of similarly sized homes and seeing how expensive they are, or looking at a bunch of similarly priced homes and comparing how nice they are. I'm not sure if there's a number that would sum up those differences so you wouldn't really have to do that, but it isn't price per square foot.