Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
It's a false narrative that people move to the Ws for schools. They move to the Ws because, generally speaking, they are the districts with easier commutes, safety (as compared to the eastern side of the county where commutes are similar), and proximity to amenities. That is primarily what drives the property value, not the schools. Poolesville has academic performance that's on par with the Ws, and the property value doesn't have any bump. Crown Farm is zoned for a district many people thing is bad and they're having no problem selling $1.5M homes right now. Dufief is zoned for Wootton, yet the outdated homes there can't sell for much.
From a real estate perspective this isn't true. The test scores still drive real estate value both for outsiders moving into the area and people moving around the area. Even if you don't care about getting a 9 or 10 school, most buyers worry about holding their real estate value so its always safer to buy in a higher ranked school system with lower crime. Dufief is a really good example. For years, Dufief rating was always lower than Travilah and Stonemill right down the road. Dufief has a dedicated special needs learning program and this pulled down its scores so these houses always sold for less. There is still a big difference between a basically identical house in the Wootton cluster and a few streets north in the QO cluster even though QO is a good school. Poolesville is just too far out there so even with great scores its just not practical for two working families.
Crown is having a hard time selling at the prices they are pushing for now. The RIO area is mostly younger people with babies or preschoolers hoping that a new school will save them from the 3 rated Gaithersburg high. No idea if this will pan out.
If you want to make money on your house you buy in DC or VA. If you want to live in Montgomery County and not lose money buy in the W district but don't buy the 1M houses. There just aren't enough people in this area that make that much.
In the last 25 years, Kentlands, Lakelands, King Farm, Park Potomac, Fallsgrove and Crown have all been developed on the fringes of the W clusters, and none of them have had any problems at the sales phase, and all of them have appreciated well over time. During the great recession, most of these neighborhoods were fairly immune to price declines. There are plenty of neighborhoods in Stone Mill, Travilah, Dufier and Fallsmead where comparable homes sell cheaper than ones in the foregoing neighborhoods. At the moment, there are new townhomes selling on Travilah Road, zoned for Wootton, that IIRC sell for about 2/3 of what the same sized townhome goes for in Crown.
There is no question that many buyers want to be in Wootton and Churchill, and will skip or leave open houses if they realize a neighborhood is zoned for RM or QO (particularly a lot of Asian buyers), but it's not really reflected in actual sales prices if you spend a lot of time going to open houses and comparing houses.
If there was a new urbanist development in Wootton or Churchill, there's no doubt that it would be very popular. Instead, buyers right now tend to have to choose in these areas: W cluster or walkable neighborhood with amenities and a town center. My experience is that there are plenty of buyers who prefer one or the other, such that the pricing isn't noticeably different between the two options. There are also plenty of people who prefer clusters like RM because they think Ws are overrated and less diverse (another topic that's hotly debated on DCUM).
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