When Jeanne Harrison, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker's Capitol Hill office in Washington, D.C., takes clients shopping for a home, her preference is to do the tour using two wheels, not four.
Real estate agents usually "drive fancy cars," says Harrison, who along with her partner, Phil Guire, prefers to bicycle instead. "We sell a lot of real estate and we get around by bike a lot." After all, in the busy, hard-to-park Capitol Hill area, pedal power "is the fastest way to get around."
Ms. Harrison, and her partner, Phil Guire, are among the growing cadre of real estate agents nationwide cycling alongside their clients to see prospective houses. While she rides her own bike, the buyers often use the cruisers for rent at the Capital Bikeshare stations.
In part because of its health and environmental benefits, biking is becoming an increasingly popular way to commute. The District's three-year-old bike-share program is flourishing. New York's Citi Bike bike-sharing program launches May 27 with thousands of three-speed bikes and hundreds of stations. In June, Chicago joins the fray with hundreds of two-wheeled cruisers, initially with about 75 solar-powered docking stations (Washington and New York's stations are solar-powered too). Within a year, Chicago's downtown and River North areas are expected to be home to 400 bike-share stations and about 4,000 bikes.
As bike lanes and paths proliferate, making biking on city streets safer, commuters are increasingly interested in biking to work and in living in bike-friendly neighborhoods.
"Proximity to bike shares is a selling point," Ms. Harrison said, noting a marked interest in the number of cyclists using bike lanes. Clients, particularly those in their twenties and thirties, want "to be near public transportation and or a bike share spot."
Gregory Billing, an advocacy coordinator with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, noted a trend in the nation's capital "with real estate purchasing around bicycle amenities such as Capital Bikeshare stations, bike lanes" and the district's new, physically protected bike lanes, known as cycle tracks. "There is a growing market for new home and condo purchases to have access to biking," like the demand for close proximity to Metro and other transit options.
Tours by agents like Ms. Harrison help show off the "bike friendliness of a neighborhood," Billing said.
In the last six years, Washington, D.C. has doubled its bike riding population and built about 60 miles of bike lanes. While many residents ride their own bicycles, the Capital Bikeshare program, started in 2010, offers more than 1800 bicycles that can be picked up at any of more than 200 stations across stations across Washington, D.C., Arlington, VA, and Alexandria, VA and returned to any station near the rider's destination." The pace is picking up there and elsewhere.
According to the League of American Bicyclists, from 2000 to 2011, the bicycle commuting rate rose in the largest "Bicycle Friendly Communities," far above the average growth of nationwide and more than double the rate of in the cities not designated as bicycle-friendly.
In what the League dubs "Bicycle Friendly Communities" such as Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Denver and Lexington, Ky., the rate of bike commuting has more than doubled since 2000. At 6.3%, Portland, Oregon, has the largest number of bike commuters, followed by Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C.
In Minneapolis, census data reports that 4500 residents commute to work by bike and the Metro Transit buses are all equipped with bike racks. The Twin Cities added 24 new stations to their bike-share program this spring for a total of 170 stations and more than 1500 bicycles that can be leased, with a $65 per year subscription, when needed from any station in the city and returned to any other.
Pedals to Properties, a full service real estate firm in Boulder, Colorado, keeps about 35 bicycles at their offices and local hotels to allow buyers the option of viewing properties and homes from cruiser bikes.
Tim Shea, the owner/broker, said many prospective buyers, often relocating from other cities and staying at hotels, prefer to do their shopping for homes in the $500,000 to $2 million range by bicycle.
"There is a growing population of people who want to live close to downtown Boulder for the easy access by bike," Shea said. About a third of the homes he and his agents show clients are by bike. "It more of less distills down to promoting a healthy lifestyle."
Shea reports that while the majority of biker clients are under 40, in the last year several clients in their early sixties have taken the bicycle option for home shopping. But for even the most enthusiastic cyclists, brokers have their limits. Bike house tours in Boulder are limited mostly to the warm weather months. Shea added, "We are not going uphill in the snow on our cruiser bikes."
