Short Pump

Late 1990s through current new construction, heavy on brick-front colonials, transitional two-story homes, and townhome and condo product inside West Broad Village. Lots are engineered rather than inherited, most homes carry an HOA, and the oldest stock here is younger than the newest stock in most of the city.

Typical range runs $450K to $700K. You are usually choosing between a builder community and a resale from the first wave of that same community twenty years later, and the resale is frequently the better house on the better lot. The mistake is shopping by subdivision name. Drive the actual street at 5:30pm, because Broad Street and the 288 ramps behave very differently at rush hour than they do on a Saturday tour.

You are competing against builder inventory that offers incentives you cannot match, so your edge is the thing the builder cannot sell: a finished yard, a lot that is not on the through street, and a school assignment that is already settled. Condition and updates matter here more than character, which is the opposite of how the city trades. Price against the actual builder incentive package, not against the builder's list price.

Everything is close and almost none of it is walkable. Short Pump Town Center, the grocery, the pediatrician, and the practice field are all inside ten minutes by car. West Broad Village is the one pocket built to be walked. The trade you are making is drive time for convenience density, and for a lot of families that trade is obviously correct.

• You want newer construction and are fine with an HOA and a smaller engineered lot.
• Errands, youth sports, and retail inside a ten minute drive matters more to you than walking to dinner.
• You want the Henrico rate of $0.83 per $100 assessed rather than the city's $1.20.

Short Pump gets dismissed by people who live inside the city as though convenience is a personality flaw. It is not. What I would push back on is buying the newest thing available. The twenty-year-old resale two streets over usually has the mature trees, the wider lot, and the finished basement, and it is often the cheaper house. New is a feature, not a strategy.