The amenity value of natural views

We estimate nonmarket values for natural views in an urban setting. These views contain the aesthetics of natural areas commonly found in public parks and open space, and offer an aspect of property valuation that previous research is unable to disentangle from proximity to parks and open space. We incorporate machine learning techniques on Google Street View images to identify natural views in an urban setting. We find positive capitalization rates associated with household views of park-like properties. Estimates are robust to a variety of specifications, including models that are identified off of new developments on neighboring properties and falsification tests that help to rule out the effect of a broader neighborhood environment. From a policy perspective, our results inform as to the optimal size, location, and shape of open space. Furthermore, machine learning methods used in the construction of our view variable provide a potentially powerful tool for other nonmarket valuation studies.     

Modeling Spatial Variation in Housing Prices: A Variable Interaction Approach

The absolute location of each real estate parcel in an urban housing market has a unique location-value signature. Accessibility indices, distant gradients and locational dummies cannot fully account for the influence of absolute location on the market price of housing because there are an indeterminable number of externalities (local and nonlocal) influencing a given property at a given location. Furthermore, the degree to which externalities affect real estate values is not only unique at each location but highly variable over space. Hence, absolute location must be viewed as interactive with other determinants of housing value. We present an interactive variables approach and test its ability to explain price variations in an urban residential housing market. The statistical evidence suggests that the value of location, as embodied in the selling price of housing units, may not be separable from other determinants of value. It is recommended that housing valuation models, therefore, be specified to allow site, structural and other independent attributes to interact with absolute location—{ x , y } coordinates—when accounting for intraurban variation in the market price of residential housing. This approach is especially useful when estimating the value of housing for geographic areas where very little is known a priori about the neighborhoods or submarkets.     

User Cost and the Demand for Housing Attributes

A number of studies have related changes in the demand for housing to changes in user cost. All have treated housing as a composite good rather than as a bundle of characteristics. We consider the effect of changing user cost on the demand for the component characteristics of owner-occupied housing, and, given information about the supply of the characteristics, we predict implicit price responses. An empirical test of our model indicates that reductions in user cost result in higher real prices for the non-replicable attributes of housing, examples being location and access to fixed amenities. In contrast, the price of attributes that are perfectly elastic in supply are not affected by changes in user costs. We conclude that the effects of changing user cost are not uniform across housing types and locations, thus generating the appearance of housing submarkets.     

Urban flight: A short-term phenomenon or long-term trend?

We investigate whether the urban flight from more to less dense locations identified by previous housing studies for the early COVID period is a temporary, pandemic-induced phenomenon, or long-term trend. We focus on the period of 2017–2022, 14,961 single-family home transactions from Southwestern Ontario, and three housing market metrics. Our results for sales price in the early pandemic periods are in line with previous studies. However, our results for sales price in the last pandemic phase (2022), marketing time, and visit activity suggest that the urban flight was a temporary phenomenon characteristic of the early COVID phases.     

成都市金沙遗址博物馆对周边住宅价格影响分析

通过分析成都市金沙遗址博物馆周边一定区域内住宅到博物馆距离与住宅价格之间的关系,建立Hedonic模型,进一步研究影响城市住宅价格因素中旅游景区这一特征对住宅价格的影响。研究结果分为1)在影响住宅价格的因素中,显著性较强的是周边市政设施、物业费、建筑装修程度和到金沙遗址博物馆距离;2)成都市金沙遗址博物馆对城市住宅价格的影响可以用半对数模型表达式表示。进而得出结论:1)影响城市住宅价格因素中旅游景区特征对周边住宅价格的提升具有正作用;2)运用Hedonic模型可以有效地将旅游景区特征对住宅价格的影响作用进行量化;3)基于旅游景区的正向作用,国家应充分重视旅游房地产业。     

The Capitalization of School Quality into Renter and Owner Housing

Residential property amenities including school quality should be capitalized into both rent and property sale prices. Evidence of price and rent premiums for higher school quality is provided. The price premium for school quality for owners exceeds the premium for renters. The premiums paid by renters and owners vary with the likelihood the household directly uses school services, housing market conditions, whether the property is in an urban or suburban area and by the observed school quality in the years leading to the transaction. The larger price premium paid by owners is supported by enhanced liquidity and tempered price volatility for properties located in quality school districts.     

城市湿地公园评价体系研究

在对我国四个重要的城市湿地公园调查的基础上,听取了实地管理专家关于城市湿地公园评价体系构建的意见和建议,从强调评价系统的实际应用出发,构建了城市湿地公园评价指标体系、指标权重和评价标准,旨在为我国城市湿地公园的发展提供指导,也为城市湿地公园的相关评价提供参考。     

Housing Attributes Associated with Capital Gain

Housing units are heterogeneous goods. Rates of change in housing prices are typically modelled as if they arise from factors unrelated to the housing unit itself. For example, housing price increases in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s are argued to have arisen primarily from demographic factors and the differential effects of inflation on the effective rate of taxation on income from corporate capital and on owner-occupied housing. Cross-sectional variation in price inflation is not addressed. Consumers who purchased housing units are not indifferent to their attributes. To the extent that expectations vary within regional housing markets as a consequence of variation in housing attributes, standard linear hedonic price regression may generate biased estimates of implicit prices. This paper identifies sufficient conditions for the estimates of implicit prices in linear hedonic price regressions to be unbiased and generate unbiased estimates of implied price changes. Finally, this paper identifies living space (house size) as a significant attribute related positively to the increase in individual housing prices in a regional market.     

Investor Confidence as a Determinant of China's Urban Housing Market Dynamics

China's urban housing market dynamics suggest that evolving investor confidence may be a relevant demand shifter. Such investors are continually updating their beliefs about the state of the macroeconomy and the policy uncertainty related to national and local housing policies. We build a 35 Chinese city real estate confidence index that varies over time and across cities. This index predicts subsequent house price appreciation and new housing sales. We document evidence of heterogeneous effects of investor confidence depending on a city's demographics and the city's elasticity of housing supply. Our results based on a new household‐level expectations survey bolster the case that investor expectations are an important determinant of real estate price dynamics.     

Searching for Goldilocks: The Distance‐Based Capitalization Effects of Local Public Services

This article empirically models the effect of distance on residential property values of three different types of services, fire, police and emergency medical services. Interesting economic trade‐offs emerge as service station proximity provides both amenity and disamenity effects. Using over three million home sales from the state of Florida along with two different measures of distance, this study provides evidence of nonlinear capitalization effects on local housing values. A difference‐in‐difference model utilizing new facility construction provides corroborating evidence of these findings.     

住房保障改革目标：居者所有其屋

由于住房是居民的最主要财产，住房性收入是居民的最主要财产性收入，所以住房调节应是财产调节的重要途径，住房收入调节应是收入调节的重要措袍；让更多居民拥有自己的房产，是实现共同富裕的重要保障，是社会主义所有制的话要内容。使居民尽量拥有自有住房，需要抑制对住房的投资需求从而控制房价水平，把廉租房、公共租赁房和经济适用房制度改为政府为低收入家庭建房制度,发展住房合作组织和集资合作建房，解决好非户籍常住人口的住房问题。     

Are New Homes Special?

This article describes alternative ways of identifying new homes and, using a large dataset of property sales in Las Vegas, Nevada, tests for the extent to which new homes sell at a price premium relative to otherwise similar existing homes. We also investigate whether the results differ across time and location, including before and after the housing bust. Our results suggest that price premia for new homes arise primarily in circumstances in which the supply of new houses is relatively low. In some cases rising to over 20% relative to otherwise similar existing homes. When new homes are plentiful, they are not special and the premium disappears.     

Evidence of the Dual Nature of Property Value Recovery Following Environmental Remediation

The literature on home value diminution attributable to environmental degradation and its possible reversal typically ignores indirect effects upon neighborhood characteristics that can exacerbate the overall change in property values, resulting in underestimates of diminution and overestimates of recovery. Furthermore, to the extent that direct price effects and neighborhood transition effects respond differently to remediation efforts, the relatively new postremediation literature misses an important part of the recovery process. This study examines both direct and indirect effects and finds in the case of Houston Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites that, while the direct value impacts of proximity to toxic waste sites was significantly reduced after remediation, the indirect effects associated with induced demographic changes were much slower to reverse, producing a housing market inertia that stifled full home value recovery.     

Science parks in Sweden – industrial renewal and development?

Science parks provide an important resource network for new technology‐based firms (NTBFs). To ascertain the 'added value' of a science park location the innovativeness of independent technology‐based science park firms are compared with the levels recorded by a comparable group of firms not located on a park. The hypotheses are empirically tested on the basis of 263 new technology‐based firms in Sweden located both on and off‐park. The survey endeavoured to cover joint‐stock firms located on the nine target science parks (163 firms). The remainder of the NTBFs were drawn from off‐park locations (100 firms). The findings on science parks performance suggest that the parks milieu appear to have a positive impact on their firms growth as measured in terms of sales and jobs. However, there was no evidence of a direct relationship between science park location and profitability. While this research provided several new insights into science parks in Sweden, numerous questions remain.     

Land-Use Controls and Housing Costs: An Examination of San Francisco Bay Area Communities*

This paper reports on our efforts to gauge the effects of land use controls on housing markets. We discuss how land use controls affect land and housing markets and explain why communities use such controls to restrict development. We present the results of an econometric model created to assess the inflationary effects of land use controls on housing costs. The model is based on data assembled in the San Francisco Bay Area. The model results indicate that density controls and land availability do systematically affect the price of new housing units.     

Revisiting the Past and Settling the Score: Index Revision for House Price Derivatives

This article examines index revision in measuring the prices for owner-occupied housing. We consider revision in the context of equity insurance and the settlement of futures contracts. The usefulness of aggregate housing price indexes in these contexts requires stability as they are extended. Methods that are subject to substantial revision raise questions about the viability of derivatives markets. We find that the most widely used house price indexes are not equally exposed to volatility in revision. Hedonic indexes appear to be substantially more stable than repeat-sales indexes and are not prone to the systematic downward revision found in the repeat-sales indexes.     

The Impact of the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 on Housing Turnover in the U.S. Single‐Family Residential Market

The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97) replaced a one‐time, post‐age‐55 capital gain exclusion with a larger gain exclusion amount that could be protected every two years without requiring that the taxpayer trades up in housing. This action had the potential to impact housing transactions for every existing homeowner, regardless of age, as well as future purchasers of housing. We analyze household‐level data to determine if the repeated ability to exclude periodic recognized capital gains on housing from taxation shortened housing tenure significantly after TRA97 became effective. We next consider whether the decline was heterogeneous across age groups, across trading up and trading down and across geography. Given that the impact of TRA97 appears at first glance to be most profound for taxpayers close to 55 years of age, a somewhat surprising result of our research is that significant decreases in tenure are pervasive, appearing in all age ranges and in samples of homeowners who trade up and who trade down. Finally, we provide additional evidence at the aggregate level that TRA97 led to measurable changes in the price elasticity of housing turnover in the four geographic regions defined by the U.S. Census Bureau (Northeast, Midwest, South and West) and in states that are home to large metropolitan housing markets.     

Imperfect Information and Investor Inferences From Housing Price Dynamics

We examine characteristics of housing price dynamics that may be consistent with rational learning and not simply irrational feedback trading. We find significant patterns of temporal and spatial diffusion that are more amenable to explanations that allow for rational components. First, we execute our tests not simply on housing price changes, but on town-by-town differentials from regional average price changes. Second, we find significant relationships with own and neighboring town differentials, but not with control groups of non-neighboring towns. Third, we find that population density, a proxy for scale economies in information production, accelerates the diffusion process. Test were performed on quarterly data for large samples from Connecticut and the San Francisco area, employing method of moments estimators.     

Riskiness of Real Estate Development: A Perspective from Urban Economics and Option Value Theory

In this article, we define a new construct for urban economic and investment analysis, which revisits the conventional wisdom that investment in real estate development is riskier than investment in stabilized property assets. This new construct, referred as a “development asset value index” (DAVI), is a value index for newly developed properties (only) in a given geographical property market. It tracks longitudinal changes in the highest and best use (HBU) value of locations, and it reveals developer and landowner behavior taking advantage of the optionality inherent in land ownership. In particular, the DAVI reflects developers' use of flexibility in the exercise of the call option to (re)develop the property to any legal use and density. We empirically estimate a DAVI for commercial property (i.e., central locations) and compare it with a corresponding traditional transaction‐price‐based property asset price index (PAPI) corrected for depreciation. We believe that the difference primarily reflects the realized value of flexibility in land development. We find that the DAVIs display greater value growth and are smoother over time and less cyclical than their corresponding PAPIs for the same locations. This suggests that developers successfully use flexibility, and that development may be riskier than stabilized property investment due primarily only to leverage effects (construction costs). Practical implications are also discussed.     

Risk and Return in the U.S. Housing Market: A Cross-Sectional Asset-Pricing Approach

This article carries out an asset-pricing analysis of the U.S. metropolitan housing market. We use ZIP code–level housing data to study the cross-sectional role of volatility, price level, stock market risk and idiosyncratic volatility in explaining housing returns. While the related literature tends to focus on the dynamic role of volatility and housing returns within submarkets over time, our risk–return analysis is cross-sectional and covers the national U.S. metropolitan housing market. The study provides a number of important findings on the asset-pricing features of the U.S. housing market. Specifically, we find (i) a positive relation between housing returns and volatility, with returns rising by 2.48% annually for a 10% rise in volatility, (ii) a positive but diminishing price effect on returns and (iii) that stock market risk is priced directionally in the housing market. Our results on the return-volatility-price relation are robust to (i) metropolitan statistical area clustering effects and (ii) differences in socioeconomic characteristics among submarkets related to income, employment rate, managerial employment, owner-occupied housing, gross rent and population density.