As a prospective home-buyer targeting a strong school district, I look for schools a favorable student teacher ratio (<= 20:1) but also bang for my buck in terms of getting as much house per dollar, as possible! However, the latter isn't a trivial landscape to assess as more often than not the affordability of a home is hinged on a reasonable home value for the purpose of tax assessment in addition to the alluring bells and whistles that set apart one similarly priced home in an optimal school district, from another. In this post, I analyze list price, tax assessed value and home quality in terms of interior components, as a function of school district.
My focus in this study is homes of value between $250k and $350k, in the Riverview School District (Oakmont, PA) and the West Jeffrson Hills School District (Jefferson Hills, PA & Pleasant Hills, PA), while focusing on statistical evidence of paying optimal value per square foot of home, without compromising on schooling quality accessible in the region. In order to do this, I wrote a PHP-based web-scraper hosted in a local WAMP environment to extricate data from the West Penn MultiList, including school-district and several fields which aren't typically accessible via any publicly available API - including the Zillow API! For those reading this article whom are interested in my code for this, please write to me in the comments, below :)
First, how does list price compare with tax assessed value in Oakmont as opposed to Jeffrson Hills? Well, the plot below is clear in terms of the fact that homes in Jeffrson Hills are tax assessed in terms of a value very close to the list price of the home, whereas in Oakmont the trend indicates a substantially lower home value assessment for tax purposes in comparison to list prices. Does this mean Oakmont homes are overpriced?
Maybe Oakmont homes are overpriced - but relative to what? To truly know this answer, we need to learn more about what square footage we get for the same dollars in the two regions!
My focus in this study is homes of value between $250k and $350k, in the Riverview School District (Oakmont, PA) and the West Jeffrson Hills School District (Jefferson Hills, PA & Pleasant Hills, PA), while focusing on statistical evidence of paying optimal value per square foot of home, without compromising on schooling quality accessible in the region. In order to do this, I wrote a PHP-based web-scraper hosted in a local WAMP environment to extricate data from the West Penn MultiList, including school-district and several fields which aren't typically accessible via any publicly available API - including the Zillow API! For those reading this article whom are interested in my code for this, please write to me in the comments, below :)
First, how does list price compare with tax assessed value in Oakmont as opposed to Jeffrson Hills? Well, the plot below is clear in terms of the fact that homes in Jeffrson Hills are tax assessed in terms of a value very close to the list price of the home, whereas in Oakmont the trend indicates a substantially lower home value assessment for tax purposes in comparison to list prices. Does this mean Oakmont homes are overpriced?
Maybe Oakmont homes are overpriced - but relative to what? To truly know this answer, we need to learn more about what square footage we get for the same dollars in the two regions!
But first, lets think about what we're paying for based on a list price...Lets remind ourselves that we're talking about a limited cohort of homes (all active listings in the two school districts in the price range of $250k to $350k, as of the first week of Sept 2017) but the data is interesting, nonetheless. When we walk into a home as a prospective home-buyer, naive to potential skeletons revealed by a thorough home inspection report, we look for granite counter tops and hardwood flooring - bells and whistles which are quite orthogonal to the primary purpose of a place of shelter (e.g.: the roof or the likelihood of the place being in a flood zone!). Nevertheless, lets take flooring, for instance - does quality flooring increase the list price of a home?
Absolutely, optics and first impressions are everything in the art of selling a good (or a maybe not so good but well-staged) home! But note that list prices are notional dollars and not the same as the selling price of a home which are on average between $10k-$15k lower than asking, at least. For more texture on the relationship between list price and sold price in the Greater Pittsburgh Area, maybe check out my previous blog post analyzing about 7.8k sold homes over the past 12 months. But going back to floors, statistics tells us that while hard-wood flooring from wall-to-wall does have its effect on fetching a higher tax assessment value in any school-district, wall-to-wall tiling or vinyl flooring isn't uncommon in homes taxed at higher valuations!
Moving on to square footage! While the assessed home values are higher in Jefferson Hills and Pleasant Hills (both in the West Jeffrson School District), Jefferson Hills offers the greatest home square-footage per dollar of tax owed, by far, relative to the overpriced and relatively smaller homes in Oakmont. What Oakmont's got going for it though is that you'll probably end up paying a bit lower of a mortgage payment in Easy Allegheny owing to the lower tax assessments of its homes, relative to Jeffrson hills (South Allegheny).
And don't forget those tiny yards in Oakmont relative to the abundance of yard space seen in homes in Jeffrson Hills! So, in conclusion, I'd say that Jeffrson Hills would be the place to get the most bang for your buck, comparing with Oakmont's Riverview School District at least. This does seem congruent with common knowledge though - after all, lets remind ourselves that Jeffrson Hills was rated the top place to raise a family in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, at one point!
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