White House Value Goes Up, Now Worth $285 Million

The value of the White House has gone up in the last four years.

According to real estate website Zillow, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is currently valued at $284.9 million. In October 2008, the White was valued at $280.9 million.

Stan Humphries, chief economist for Zillow, told Market Watch:

“The areas that have weathered the housing downturn the best have four industries that are prevalent: health care, government, education and military—and D.C. has all four of these in spades.”

Still, the White House’s value has dropped more than $10 million since its peak in 2006. According to Zillow, the White House was worth $299.9 million at the height of the real estate boom in June 2006.

Humphries said that determining the White House’s value was nearly impossible because of the location’s historic value. In order to come up with a price for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Zillow looked at several other historical homes in the DC area and found that the maximum premium for a historical home was about 300%. The real estate company figured that the historical premium of the White House would be about one-third higher than that.

Humphries said:

“It’s almost a nonsensical exercise in itself … What we were trying to do is approach it as if it did not have infinite value.”

So what if there was no historic value to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Real estate website Movoto placed the value of the White House between $110 and $115 million if historical significance was taken out of the equation.