Homeowners’ Quest for the Best Schools

Joe Schmelzer for The Wall Street Journal

Houston lawyer Anne Ferazzi Hammett spent about three months last spring looking for a great high school for her teenage daughters, Anna and Nora. Then she discovered Westlake, a high school that gets top marks in academic rankings and draws strong reviews from parents.

The only drawback: The school is located in Austin, Texas, about 165 miles northwest of the Hammetts’ home. Nonetheless, Ms. Ferazzi Hammett and her husband, Rick Hammett, bought a $2.25 million house in Westlake’s school district, and they and their daughters will move in June.

“We will start a new life in a new place,” said Ms. Ferazzi Hammett, 56, who will telecommute. Mr. Hammett, 63, will commute back to Houston for his work as an attorney. It’s all worth it for “a great academic experience for the girls,” she said.

For some home buyers, there is no factor more important than the public schools their children will attend. They analyze student-body performance on standardized tests, school rankings, what percentage of alumni go on to four-year colleges and which schools send students to Ivy League or top-tier state universities. They then uproot their lives to move within these districts’ boundaries, where homes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than nearby homes zoned to different schools.

In La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., a city in Los Angeles county, the acclaimed La Cañada Unified School District determines the real-estate market, agents say. “I’m very busy in March, when the private-school rejection letters go out,” said Anne Sanborn, a real-estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty in Pasadena. When parents find out their kids haven’t been accepted at elite private schools, they start house hunting in La Cañada, Ms. Sanborn said.

Ms. Sanborn added that “there is a mass exodus from La Cañada when their kids graduate high school,” as families sell their homes and seek neighborhoods closer to downtown Los Angeles or Pasadena.

Online tools that measure student performance have made it easier for home buyers and agents to assess schools across the country.

For example, GreatSchools, an Oakland, Calif., nonprofit, rates schools based primarily on how well students perform on statewide assessments and has provided rankings to real-estate websites Zillow, Trulia, Move and realtor.com, said Weezie Hough, director of strategic partnerships.

In an analysis of 1.6 million home listings in the U.S. through the first six months of 2016, Realtor.com found that houses in public-school districts with GreatSchools ratings of 9 or 10, the highest scores possible, were priced, on average, 77% higher than homes in nearby districts with scores of 6 or lower. Additionally, homes located in top districts sell four days faster—at 58 days—than the national median of 62 days, the analysis found. (News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, also owns realtor.com, the listing website of the National Association of Realtors.)

Clark, 14, and Luke, 12, both go to Bronxville schools.

Dorothy Hong for the Wall Street Journal

The real-estate market in Bronxville, N.Y., a village located about 15 miles north of Manhattan, shows how a highly reputed school district affects sales. Homes within the district sell for twice the price per square foot ($654) as those with Bronxville addresses that aren’t zoned to Bronxville schools ($330), said Kathleen Collins, an agent with Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty in Bronxville.

Part of the reason buyers swallow the high prices—and high property taxes—is because nearby New York City private schools are even more expensive, Ms. Collins said.

Real-estate agent Denise Stephens and her husband, Tim, a 47-year-old banker, bought a $2 million home in Bronxville in 2015 so their three children could attend school in the village. Property taxes on their home—which are roughly 2% of the assessed home value—amount to $41,000 a year, Ms. Stephens said. But the couple sees the total package as “absolutely a better deal than the private schools,” said Ms. Stephens, who is 50 years old. The couple previously lived in Manhattan, where they paid $32,000 a year in private elementary-school tuition and $15,000 for private preschool. Today, the same schools cost even more, Ms. Stephens said.

Finding a house they could afford in Bronxville was a multiyear saga. They moved midyear to Bronxville and found a “pretty dilapidated” townhouse for rent for $5,500 a month on a short-term lease, she said. Ms. Stephens, who also works in home décor, home staging and has an estate-sale company, fixed up the rental with new curtains, paint and carpeting. Four months after they moved in, a real-estate agent told her the owner wanted to sell it. The family moved to another townhouse for $6,000 a month, and a year later to another one for $6,500 a month.

For Ms. Stephens, the many moves and the costs have been worthwhile for the “high-achieving, rigorous” schools where “it’s cool to be smart,” she said.

After graduation, Ms. Collins, the agent, said homeowners are eager to unburden themselves of the high property tax bill and often move to Mount Vernon, Yonkers, and other nearby cities.

The real-estate market in Bronxville, N.Y., a village located about 15 miles north of Manhattan, shows how a highly reputed school district affects sales. Homes within the district sell for twice the price per square foot ($654) as those with Bronxville addresses that aren’t zoned to Bronxville schools ($330), said Kathleen Collins, an agent with Julia B. Fee Sotheby’s International Realty in Bronxville.

Part of the reason buyers swallow the high prices—and high property taxes—is because nearby New York City private schools are even more expensive, Ms. Collins said.

Real-estate agent Denise Stephens and her husband, Tim, a 47-year-old banker, bought a $2 million home in Bronxville in 2015 so their three children could attend school in the village. Property taxes on their home—which are roughly 2% of the assessed home value—amount to $41,000 a year, Ms. Stephens said. But the couple sees the total package as “absolutely a better deal than the private schools,” said Ms. Stephens, who is 50 years old. The couple previously lived in Manhattan, where they paid $32,000 a year in private elementary-school tuition and $15,000 for private preschool. Today, the same schools cost even more, Ms. Stephens said.

Finding a house they could afford in Bronxville was a multiyear saga. They moved midyear to Bronxville and found a “pretty dilapidated” townhouse for rent for $5,500 a month on a short-term lease, she said. Ms. Stephens, who also works in home décor, home staging and has an estate-sale company, fixed up the rental with new curtains, paint and carpeting. Four months after they moved in, a real-estate agent told her the owner wanted to sell it. The family moved to another townhouse for $6,000 a month, and a year later to another one for $6,500 a month.

For Ms. Stephens, the many moves and the costs have been worthwhile for the “high-achieving, rigorous” schools where “it’s cool to be smart,” she said.

After graduation, Ms. Collins, the agent, said homeowners are eager to unburden themselves of the high property tax bill and often move to Mount Vernon, Yonkers, and other nearby cities.

Anna Hammett, 14, does her homework in the kitchen of her home in Houston.

Amy Mikler for The Wall Street Journal

Opting for public schools isn’t always a dollars-and-cents decision. Ms. Ferazzi Hammett, the Houston lawyer, said she looked at private schools and decided the family could afford them. But she was turned off by the small size of parochial schools and the “country club, uber rich” atmosphere of elite private schools, she said.

“I’m looking for a broader-based experience for my kids and for them to be exposed to different types of kids, including race and socioeconomic status,” she said.

Persuading her daughters to pick up and move to Austin right before high school took some doing. On a lunch break during a day of house hunting, Ms. Ferazzi Hammett’s agent, Tracy Picone of Realty Austin, brought along her own 17-year-old daughter, Lana, to help prepare the girls for what to expect. A Westlake senior, Lana talked about participating in choir at the high school, as well as playing soccer and basketball in middle school, Ms. Picone said.

Last year, Jeff and Denise Springer sold their house in L.A.’s “hipster” neighborhood of Silver Lake for $1 million and bought a larger house in “small-towny, suburban” La Cañada for $1.6 million, Ms. Springer said. Competition for homes within the La Cañada district is so intense, “we saw that house at 10 a.m., offered full price, and were in escrow by 5 p.m.,” Ms. Springer said.

Before choosing La Cañada, “I had a spreadsheet of private schools, charter schools and public schools” that could be options for their girls, Daisy, 13, and Josephine, 11. The couple debated the value of staying in the artsy Silver Lake neighborhood they loved and paying $20,000 to $40,000 a year for private school against the merits of uprooting themselves to high-cost La Cañada.

Ultimately, “it dawned on me,” said Mr. Springer, a 46-year-old attorney who also plays guitar in a rock band. “When the girls go to college, we cannot sell a private-school education,” Mr. Springer said. But someday when they sell the La Cañada house, access to a top-quality education will be part of the deal, he said.

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