Evaluating the Neighborhood Streetscape Before Buying a New Home

If you're going to be buying a new home in the near future, now's the time to start driving around various neighborhoods in your community. Why? Because you want to evaluate the streetscape. Everyone always talks about the landscaping, the hardscaping and the masonry, but streetscape is just as important when buying a new home, and can make a tremendous difference in the resale value of real estate.

What is Streetscape?

Streetscape refers to the lay-out of the neighborhood, but it's far more detailed than that. When you are evaluating the streetscape of a neighborhood, you want to look at not only the intersecting roads and home placement, but also the topography. Sloping neighborhoods versus flat communities; curved driveways versus straight ones; wide spacing between houses or narrow; low curbs or high ones.

Although the landscaping and hardscaping of the new home you choose to buy is undeniably important, the streetscape will often be a better indicator of the value of real estate. No one wants to move into an ugly neighborhood, and after your community matures a bit, you might have a more difficult time selling if you didn't accurately evaluate the streetscape.

What is Considered Advantageous?

When it comes it streetscape, you are looking for as much variation as possible because it looks better in mature neighborhoods. For example, are the garages all on the same side of every house, or do they alternate randomly? Are one-story homes intermixed with two-story houses? They say that variety is the spice of life, but it is also of great importance of real estate, where nobody wants to live in a tract home that looks the same as their neighbors'.

It is also a good idea to look at the variety of landscaping in a neighborhood, which is a tremendous part of streetscape. For example, my father's neighborhood has a healthy mixture of pines, firs, spruces, junipers, oaks, ashes and leafy bushes. If each of the houses is landscaped in the same manner, you're looking at severe monotony as the plants begin to mature.