By Barbara Ruben, Special to The Washington Post, Saturday, September 26, 2009
In their quest to move out of their rented Rockville townhouse and buy a single-family home, Lisa Hollaender and her husband, Laurent, first considered the Carderock Springs neighborhood of Bethesda, then moved on to Potomac and later explored Olney. They also ventured across the Potomac to Vienna. But they haven’t been to a single open house, let alone made an offer.
Hollaender is first finding the school she considers best suited for her son, who is both very bright and physically challenged.
“Ultimately school fit is number one, house location a far second,” said Hollaender, whose son recently started kindergarten. The family has decided to stay put in Rockville this year and send him to a private school, but that’s a temporary solution. “We cannot continue to pay for private school, plus buy our ‘dream home,’ ” Hollaender said.
In the Washington area, with its uber-educated parents and high schools that perennially make it to the top tiers of national rankings, schools often rule when it comes to making home-buying decisions.
“People come armed with notebooks full of data and say, ‘I want this school or that, and don’t show me houses in these districts,’ ” said RE/MAX agent Mike Aubrey, who also hosts the new HGTV show “Real Estate Intervention,” which focuses on home selling in the Washington area.
Under the Fair Housing Act, real estate agents aren’t allowed to recommend schools or steer families into certain neighborhoods. Instead, they recommend that parents comb through the reams of data (from SAT scores to absenteeism rates) available on local school district Web sites and check out independent sources, such as GreatSchools.net.
Some agents also recommend that parents look at rankings by national magazines. For example, U.S. News and World Report’s 2008 rankings placed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Fairfax County, No. 1 in the nation, while Walt Whitman High in Bethesda was No. 44, Thomas S. Wootton High in Rockville was 54, McLean High was 55 and Potomac’s Winston Churchill High was 57, based on test scores, demographics and performance in AP classes.
Two years ago, Kristen Becker combed through the volumes of data on the Anne Arundel County Public Schools Web site, looking not just at test scores but also at teacher turnover, graduation rates, absenteeism and the availability of extracurricular activities.
“Our choice was not primarily based on academics, but more on safety, social conditions and the types of peer influence that our boys would have,” said Becker, a Crofton mother of three sons, 4 to 16.”I literally called a real estate agent and said, ‘This is my budget, and here is the school.’ ”
When Lanna Broyles moved from Los Angeles to Virginia last year, she also compared school sites. She looked at the percentage of children who received subsidized lunches and also at the number of foreclosures and short sales in different neighborhoods, and said she often found lower test scores in areas where those numbers were high. She avoided those neighborhoods as she looked for a house in Prince William County, eventually buying one in Bristow.
But some parents say that schools are only one of myriad features they look at when buying a house — and for some, they aren’t a factor at all.
When Michael Reinemer remarried, he said he paid no attention to schools when buying a new house. Three of his children attended school in Arlington County. His youngest is now in elementary school in Annandale in the Fairfax County system.
“I have seen a pronounced school-boundary mentality among some parents. But I think the boundary obsession is blown out of proportion to its educational significance, at least in Northern Virginia, where all the schools are good,” he said. “It’s more of a status or prestige thing, like ‘Lake Wobegon, where everyone is above average.’ ”
And dry statistics can’t always paint the full picture, as Broyles found out.
“I realized that despite all that research, nothing compares to the quality of the individual teacher,” she said. “There are good and bad teachers at every school. My son had a mediocre teacher last year, despite his school being on Virginia’s School of Excellence list.”
Karin Rotchford had the opposite experience.
She bought her Arlington Forest home before she got married, not focusing on the schools. After her daughter, now a kindergartener, was born, she started looking at the neighborhood elementary, finding it “not that great compared to a lot of the other North Arlington schools.”
But she also discovered that “there is a fabulous principal there now who runs a great program, and family/community involvement seems very high. Every one of my neighbors with children attending [the school] is very pleased with it, so we’ve stopped worrying and are thrilled our daughter will attend kindergarten there.”
Rotchford had considered moving but discovered that “a lot of houses I see in arguably better school districts are not as nice as ours or don’t have neighborhoods as nice as ours. . . . We can’t seem to afford a larger house in one of these ‘better’ school districts.”
As Rotchford found, the school district can have a profound affect on house prices.
When real estate agent Deborah Knuckey, with Continental Properties, lived in the Barnaby Woods neighborhood in Northwest Washington, she found that houses on the District side of Western Avenue, the boundary between Washington and Maryland, sold for $50,000 to $100,000 less than comparable ones on the Chevy Chase side. She attributes that directly to sought-after Montgomery County schools.
“Another great example is the price drop that occurs in Virginia as you leave Falls Church city. A shabby saltbox in Falls Church city can command what a small colonial in reasonable condition commands in surrounding neighborhoods,” she said, chalking it up to the popularity of the Falls Church city schools.
According to Nathalie Bourdereau, an agent with Keller Williams Metro Realty, a three-bedroom, two-bath house in the part of Kensington that is within the Walter Johnson High School cluster will cost about $150,000 more than a similar house in the Twinbrook area, within Rockville High School boundaries. It’s primarily because of the schools, she said.
“Even if a first-time buyer is single and doesn’t have a family, they inquire about the schools for resale purposes,” she said.
Houses that are in desirable school clusters are getting multiple offers, even in this market, Bourdereau said. Aubrey said he is seeing the same thing in the Ballston area of Arlington.
Kristen Becker got $395,000 for her old house and bought a comparable one for $520,000 to be within the boundaries for the schools she wanted.
“We put ourselves in a bad place financially,” she said. “We totally bit the bullet and just went for it.”
If schools are important to you, Knuckey advises, consider staying in your home until your child is out of elementary school, as studies show that the quality of elementary schools is more consistent than for high schools.
“I’ve worked with clients who as soon as they’re pregnant they want to move. That’s so out of line,” she said. “What’s silly is that parents often choose their homes based on high school district while the kid is still crawling. Chances of living in the same area 14 years later are so remote that they should save their money and give Junior’s college fund a head start rather than flee to a great school district too soon.”
Silver Spring financial planner Rebecca Schreiber said she worries that some parents take on too much debt when buying in their ideal school district, reasoning that they would rather spend the money on their house than on private school.
“They buy the home based on two full-time incomes. Children come along, and child-care bills put the family under major, and unanticipated, financial strain,” she said. “Since the cost of child care will only be removed by a public school education, the parents cling to their home as a way out.”
Knuckey advises taking a step back to examine more than just schools in home-buying decisions.
“While schools are really important, it is important to look at the whole. Sometimes I see people with a much longer commute after they buy near a school they want, and then they see their children less because they’re in the their cars all the time,” she said. “You have to remember, all of real estate is about tradeoffs between the location and size of home, and schools just make that mix all the more complicated.”
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