Newage Home Buying Tips

Going by what you see on TV shows or magazine articles on home buying tips, just about the only three rules you need to keep in mind taking out a home are "location, location, location". For a family looking to take out a home, you could take that to mean a place in a quiet neighborhood, where there are good schools and facilities nearby. Neighborhood planners though, have recently taken to a new addition to the location mantra: the one of being walker-friendly. And you would be surprised that something as New Agey-sounding as this, should make it to the mainstream. But urban developers today promote the idea very enthusiastically that cities, or neighborhoods, at least, should be designed for people and children who wish to get everything done through the course of their day with nothing more than their own two feet. Why is this so important all of a sudden? And where did they get this idea? From a movie about the idealized 60's?

The argument is that having regular, wholesome people walking about, doing their business every day, it's more likely to keep shady street types away than any amount of law enforcement. This might make a lot of sense on a list of home buying tips too. Surveys do report that there is a certain feel-good factor to living in a neighborhood where everything posted by the social activity of walking. They even have a measure and a scale to estimate the walk-friendliness score of a neighborhood. They call it WalkScore; the walk score is a scale that grades the neighborhood for how many places of daily family interest, parks, libraries, schools or shops are easily reached on foot.

You could visit WalkScore.com to see how it rates any neighborhood in 40 cities across the country that you might be interested in calling your own. You could type in any address you have in mind: the White House for example is apparently in a stellar locality for walker-friendliness. Home buying tips of this nature may not have been expressed in so many words before, but our values do seem to count for the walker friendliness index. In the housing meltdown of 2008, homes and suburbs happened to fall the most in value. Homes in well-established neighborhoods that had all the amenities a walk away, typically held their value. This new home valuing index seems to have caught the fancy of analysts at real estate businesses. There are in-depth walker-friendliness databases being prepared for every single neighborhood out there.

As home buying advice columnists begin to list walker-friendliness in their flashcards of stock home buying tips, Google is beginning to put together databases on home sale prices and values. And would you believe it, home prices in walking neighborhoods seem to regularly score higher for longer.