Working at Microsoft and buying in “the Zone”

No matter where you live, there is an “imaginary neighborhood” with “imaginary lines”.  While these neighborhoods only exist in the minds of the residents, and you won’t find them in a book or on a map, they are very real, and greatly impact the value or lack thereof, of real estate.  A good/bad example for those trying to sell their homes, is when you live in the “right zip code, but wrong town” or in the “right school district, but wrong zip code”.

Here on “The Eastside”, some of the people who work at Microsoft, have created a value-based artifical “neighborhood” that I call “The Zone“.  The residents of this “neighborhood” are then, of course, called “The Zonies”.  Zonies being a sub-set, if you will, of “Microsoftees”.  I don’t like the term Microsoftees, though I hear it often, because people who work at Microsoft…are anything BUT soft, for sure.  Property values in “the Zone” are affected greatly by the supply and demand factor of people who work at Microsoft wanting to live near where they work.  Given the number of Microsoft employees, it is pretty safe to say that their actions greatly impact, and to a large extent control, the values in this “zone”.