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‘Hottest Neighborhoods’ Follow Job Growth, Lower Home Prices

California leads the nation with four of the top 10 hottest neighborhoods in the United States, according to real estate brokerage firm Redfin.

The firm determines the “hottest” neighborhoods by analyzing pageviews on its website, monitoring the homes its users favorited to monitor for price and status changes. The analysis also took into account insights from Redfin real estate agents who specialize in neighborhoods across 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas.

The Bushrod neighborhood of Oakland, California tops the list, with a median home sale price of $817,000 and homes spending an average of 49 days on the market.

The site’s real estate experts noted that high-growth job centers are driving the demand in these neighborhoods, with the top three hottest neighborhoods being located near the tech centers of San Francisco and Seattle.

While prices continue to rise in these tech capitals, however, experts with Redfin say many home buyers are increasingly looking toward neighboring cities that are close to job opportunities while offering quick access to public transit, trendy shopping and dining options, and larger, charming, move-in ready homes with smaller price tags. Those cities include Bellevue, Sunnyvale, and Oakland, in which Bushrod lies.

“Bushrod is a quaint enclave of homes with unique character nestled between the more established (and expensive) area of Rockridge and the increasingly trendy hot spot of Temescal,” said Redfin real estate agent Tom Hendershot. “From Bushrod you can walk to some of the Bay Area's best restaurants on College Ave. It's also walking distance to either the Ashby or Rockridge BART stations.”

Other neighborhoods on the list include the Edgeworth neighborhood of Malden, Massachusetts, the Greenfield neighborhood of Aurora, Colorado and the Treme neighborhood of New Orleans, Louisiana. Redfin predicts that many new home buyers will be searching for homes further inland near “second-tier cities” this year.

“Redfin research shows that over the past five years, home prices in urban cores have shot up 50 percent faster than in the metro areas as a whole,” said Redfin Chief Economist Nela Richardson. “Our data on homebuyer activity shows that this year people are bypassing the most expensive areas in the center city in search for high-end amenities and renovated homes that are a few train or bus stops outside the city limits. The hottest neighborhoods of 2017 will be those edge communities that deliver urban convenience at prices that are closer to earth.”

About Author: Phil Banker

Phil Banker began his career in journalism after graduating from the University of North Texas. He has covered a number of communities across Texas and southern Oklahoma, writing news and sports for publications including the Ardmoreite, Ennis Daily News and the Plano Star-Courier. He is currently a staff writer for the MReport.
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