Measuring the Effect of Green Space on Property Value: An Application of the Hedonic Spatial Quantile Regression

Green space is an important part of environment around houses. Generally, most research focused on the economic impacts of green space on urban planning and environmental pollution cost, but ignored the impact on single family home values. Limited research was conducted in this area and few studies of green space and housing prices have incorporated spatial econometric techniques. This technique is necessary since housing value may be influenced by characteristics of nearby properties. This research attempts to quantify the impacts of green space, by using the hedonic price analysis of the relationship between property values and the green space amenities around the selected single family houses in Delaware County, Ohio. Also, by incorporating spatial-lag term, we can compare the results with and without spatial effect. Eventually, after extending the model by quantile regression, the influence of different green space characteristics on housing price may change across the conditional distribution of housing price. Substantial variation was found between the results with and without spatial effects across quantiles, which indicates that luxury house buyers may value green space differently from middle or low level house buyers.