Increasing Your Homes Value

What can you do to increase your homes equity by 50%?

The biggest factor in valuing a home is its neighborhood or more precisely its school. The biggest driver for a buyer is generally the quality of the school. And the way most buyers judge the quality of a school in California is its API score.

In Fremont, we have some of the best schools in the state based on API scores. However, the homes associated with Fremont’s Mission San Jose High School command a 50% premium over the other schools in Fremont, simply because the elementary, middle and high schools associated with this high school all score over 900 on the API scores. Here are the 2006 API scores for this Mission High School District: Four elementary schools are: Chadbourne 975, Gomes 989, Mission San Jose 991, Mission Valley 944), for the middle school: Hopkins 972), and for the high school (Mission San Jose 932). FYI 1000 is a perfect score.

Homes in the Mission Schools neighborhood sell between $500 to $750/sqft. These homes are generally old, and dated layouts and have lower ceiling heights than you would find in today's newer construction.

In other parts of Fremont, where only the elementary school scores above 900, and the middle and high school get a score in the high 700s the homes sell for $330-$500/sqft.

Similarly in Union City, West of Union City Blvd., where the homes are all newer construction (read modern more pleasing interiors), and associated with Delaine Eastin Elementary API 876, Alvarado Middle 768, and James Logan High School API 731. These homes sell between $360-$450/sqft.

These homes are close to 2/3 the price of the Mission San Jose School neighborhood, yet they are newer, in better condition and better kept neighborhoods.

If neighborshoods were to organize, and work with schools, teachers, and PTAs to create after school programs to help raise these school's scores above 900, they should be able to raise their API scores, thereby increasing the demand for homes in these neighborhoods and correspndingly these homes prices.

The best suited neighborhoods for this effort, would be communities that have a high percentage of the homes online, which makes communication easy, and neighborhoods where both parents are not working, thereby allowing the free parents to be volunteer time to help her kids and others.

It's never been attempted before, but worth an effort.