The influence of urban design packages on home values
International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis
ISSN: 1753-8270
Article publication date: 3 April 2017
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of neighborhood design templates on residential home values in King County, WA, USA. Previous research examines a number of individual design factors; this study combines these factors into typologies and tests for the impacts of the composite set of design features.
Design/methodology/approach
The study analyzes over 27,000 home sales with a hedonic price model to measure the impacts across three large, regional submarkets. Neighborhood design categories are developed using a cluster analysis on a set of individual neighborhood attributes.
Findings
The key finding from this research is that the impact of more traditional (“urban”) design packages on home values is highly contextual. For the older and denser neighborhoods in the study area, a more traditional design results in a significantly positive impact on home values. In the new and more suburban regions of the study area, this effect is not found.
Originality/value
Prior work focused on valuing design attributes individually. The study argues that neighborhood design is better conceived of as a “package”, as the value of a given design element may depend on other co-located attributes. This is the first study, to the authors’ knowledge, to treat physical neighborhood design variables as a composite whole and to attempt to value their impact on home values as such.
Keywords
Citation
Bitter, C. and Krause, A. (2017), "The influence of urban design packages on home values", International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, Vol. 10 No. 2, pp. 184-203. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-08-2015-0049
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited