Several weeks ago we had a little item in this space about a national study from Zillow.com that said house prices near a Starbucks increase faster than houses near a Dunkin' Donuts shop. Now we have the local data, which shows that in the Twin Cities metro, homes within a quarter mile of a Starbucks appreciated 14.3 percentage points more than all homes in the metro between 1997 and 2013.
That data originally appeared in an excerpt from "Zillow Talk: The New Rules of Real Estate," Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff and chief economist, Stan Humphries, who attribute some of that increase to a tendency for Starbucks to locate their stores in relatively upscale neighborhoods. "Whatever the reasons—because they genuinely like drinking coffee, or because they see Starbucks as a proxy for gentrification—it seems pretty clear that people are paying a premium for homes near Starbucks," the authors said. "And furthermore, it looks like Starbucks itself is driving the increase in home values."
Here's the low-down for the Twin Cities metro:
