How do transport infrastructure and policies affect house prices and rents? Evidence from Athens, Greece

The interaction between land use and transportation infrastructure is a topic that has been extensively researched and continues to be of interest as new underlying economic, infrastructure and environmental conditions emerge. In this research, the direct and indirect effects of transportation infrastructure and policies on house prices and rents are studied. Since real estate transaction data are not available, a web-scraping tool was developed to parse house prices and attributes from publicly available resources. Econometric models of two categories were then estimated: (1) hedonic price models, based on Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and (2) spatial econometric models, such as the spatial regression model (SAR), spatial error (SEM), Durbin (SDM) and autocorrelation (SAC) model and Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR), which are increasingly used by econometricians in order to capture the effect of the – usually unobserved – spatial factors on house valuation.