Can Eloquent preserve data types? Everything is being returned as string

I'm doing this in my controller:

$property = Property::findOrFail($id);
return response()->json(['property' => $property]);

The JSON response that comes out does the preserve the original datatypes I set in the Database. Here is a sample response for that request:

{
  "id": "4",
  "name": "Flatiron Building",
  "address1": "175 5th Ave",
  "address2": "",
  "city": "New York",
  "state": "NY",
  "zip": "10010",
  "total_sq_ft": "250000",
  "occupied_sq_ft": "225000",
  "vacant_sq_ft": "25000",
  "created_at": "2015-11-30 23:31:16",
  "updated_at": "2015-11-30 23:31:16",
}

The id, total_sq_ft, occupied_sq_ft and vacant_sq_ft should be integers, but are coming out as strings.

After doing a var_dump() on $property I noticed that all the keys and the values under attributes property (is this the correct property I should be looking at?) are strings. This is why I'm thinking Eloquent models are distorting the original data types and converting everything to a string.

How do I keep the data types intact?