Hipsters create hot housing markets

Farm-to-table restaurants, dive bars, breweries and
independent record stores give a city a “hipster” vibe – and also attract unexpected home buyers.
Realtor.com and Yelp ranked the Hottest Hipster Markets in America, which have strong buyer demand with homes selling in about 30 days. Javier Vivas, director of economic research for Realtor.com, said in a news release that “a concentration of hipsters seems to be an indicator of a hot housing market.”
Columbus, Ohio, ZIP 43202, came in first place for its art, music, theater and museums. Columbus is home to Ohio State University, which creates a pipeline of young design talent. Behind New York and Los Angeles, Columbus has the highest number of fashion designers.
Merriam-Webster defines a hipster as “a person who is unusually aware of and interested in new and unconventional patterns (as in jazz or fashion).”
In California, “flipsters,” or millennials hipsters who flip homes, are taking over the market and changing the aesthetic of neighborhoods, The Los Angeles Times reported. A specific subset of flipsters forgo traditional vertical fences for horizontal board fences in the front yard, per The Los Angeles Times.
“That immediately identifies a house — OK, someone has come in and hipsterized this,” David Raposa, head of Los Angeles-based City Living Realty, told The Los Angeles Times. He said it’s a way for flipsters “to put their stamp on a house, a kind of advertisement for buyers who can then expect an upgraded, hip house.”
Here are the top 10 metro areas following Columbus:
2. Seattle, Wash. – ZIP 98122
3. San Diego, Calif. – 92104
4. Fort Wayne, Ind. – 46802
5. Rochester, N.Y. – 14620
6. San Francisco, Calif. – 94117
7. Long Beach, Calif. – 90814
8. Louisville, Ky. – 40217
9. Grand Rapids, Mich. – 49506
10. Colorado Springs, Colo. – 80903
Yelp used data to rank zip codes by the share of businesses with reviews containing the word “hipster.” Then Realtor.com calculated the Market Hotness Index for each zip code, based on the number of page views each market received on the real estate site. Yelp and Realtor.com combined both sets of data to identify the zip code in each hot metro area with the most hipster businesses.