stormwind-keep
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Grommash hold worth $3.2M
Light-hearted Real Estate bloggers Movoto have blogged in the past about assessing the value of Stormwind Keep, concluding that it was valued at approximately $10.2 million. Now, they're back with Grommash Hold, the Horde stronghold in the heart of Orgrimmar. Like any good valuation, they've taken various aspects of the building into consideration, noting that it includes a training area as well as a throne room, and worked out the square footage, the location, and an appropriate price per square foot. In order to assess the area of the hold, they estimated the shoulder width of a female orc, and based measurements off that, giving a total area of 10,261sqft. They then looked for a real-world equivalent of Grommash Hold, and decided upon Petra, in Jordan. Alas, being an ancient monastery, Petra lacks saleable homes, so they took an average value of $328psqft from nearby Amman, and applied that to Grommash Hold, giving a value of $3,265,608. Now, as someone who worked in commercial Real Estate for 7 years, I feel Movoto might have missed some due diligence. There is a bit of additional information about the future of the area, and it seems likely that it will be subject to some major political upheaval in the coming months. This is likely to impact the $/sqft value, and, one would think, put it below that of Stormwind!
Stormwind Keep valued at $10,293,472
The blog Movoto (tagline: "The lighter side of real estate") has done evaluations of fictional properties before. This time, they've set their sites on Stormwind Keep, of our own beloved Stormwind, to try and determine the following: How big is it, actually? What's its real world equivalent location? How much would it cost to purchase, based on the previous two factors? The answers, in brief, to those three questions are: 47,219 square feet, Caernarfon Castle, Gwynedd, Wales, and US$10,293,472 ($218 per square foot), respectively. Ten million dollars seems like a whole lot to me, but article author Randy Nelson asserts that it's actually rather a pittance for a castle. Then again, he also points out that as far as we can tell, Stormwind Keep only has one accessible floor, and the rest is all for show. Even the Ruins of Lordaeron are bigger than Stormwind Keep. See what you've done, game designers?! You've devalued your own non-existent property! Back at the blog, Nelson gives an in-depth breakdown of how he came about all the numbers as well as how he determined that Caernarfon Castle was the best approximation of Stormwind Keep in the world. I highly recommend a read of the entire article--don't just stop at the infographic! The whole thing is interesting and fun. I'd love to see more analyses like this, if the blog authors have the time and inclination, if only so that we players could have yet another aspect of our chosen factions and races to argue about.
