West Hartford is nationally recognized as an excellent place to live, receiving kudos from Kiplinger Personal Finance Magazine twice this year, for being one of the 10 Best Cities for the Coming Decade and 10 Great Cities for Raising a Family.
Within West Hartford, The Center is always mentioned as a primary attraction. Visitors and residents converge for the diverse mixture of work and play, with numerous restaurants, unique shops, and energy that complements the numerous businesses and town offices. In the real estate markets “Walk to Center” is a powerful selling point.
Residential opportunities in The Center are numerous and diverse. They primarily include single-family homes and condominiums, but there are also multi-family properties available. We wanted to look a little more closely at the single-family housing stock in the area using the Connecticut Multiple Listing Service (CTMLS). The CTMLS is the database used by real estate agents to share information about their listings, and the data is considered reliable, but not guaranteed.
Is there a typical home? What are the most common number of bedrooms and baths? How large are homes in this area? We can investigate all of these questions by looking at transactions in the CTMLS since it began tracking data in 2000. There are over 900 data points for single-family homes sold around West Hartford Center, so hopefully it will be a representative sample of the total collection of homes.
Over half of the homes in The Center have 3 bedrooms. It is also common to see 4 bedroom houses, but only about 10% of the properties have 5 or more bedrooms.
Over half of the homes in the Center have 1.5 baths, through there is quite a bit of diversity here. The bathroom configuration can vary based on the style of the property, so capes and ranches may not have a half bath, while colonials usually do have one on the first floor.
Living space shows up as a smooth distribution, with a nice long tail extending out to the larger homes. Nearly half of the properties contain between 1,500 and 2,000 sqft. In the last chart, the lot size tends towards just under a quarter acre.
Since this post is in danger of chart overload, we’ll pass on the remaining stats without visuals. 47.5% of homes have a 1 car garage, while 46.7% have a 2 car garage. Finally, the vast majority of the homes were built between 1916 and 1945.
West Hartford Center is often seen as the face of the Town of West Hartford. It is truly a mixed use environment with business, entertainment, and residential areas in close proximity. For those interested in moving to The Center, these results show that the average West Hartford Center home has 3 bedroom and 1.5 baths over about 1,600 sqft, and is set on about 0.22 acres. It has a garage, and was most likely built before 1945.