Finding the Missing Premium: An Explanation of Home Values within Residential Community Associations

Supporters of Residential Community Associations (RCA) argue that one of the advantages of living in an RCA is an increase in property values. Using a unique dataset comprised of 124,878 home sales spanning ten years, this paper, in one of the first empirical studies of RCAs, finds that the higher home values believed to exist, while present in a comparison of means, disappear when characteristics are controlled for. The explanation of this unexpected result is that the gain from living within an RCA is hidden by the homogeneity of the homes within RCAs.