Home Sale Prices Research Articles

Dwellings for the Severely Mentally Disabled and Neighborhood Property Values: The Details Matter

The research investigates the effects of dwellings occupied exclusively by severely mentally disabled (SMD) tenants on sales prices of nearby homes. Hedonic price models are estimated for an exhaustive sample of single-family home sales from 1989 to first quarter 1992 in Newark and Mt. Vernon, OH. Proximity within two blocks of rehabilitated dwellings occupied by SMD had no significant relationship with sales prices. Prices of homes proximate to two small, newly constructed apartment complexes were 40% lower after the complexes opened, although those near three other similar apartment complexes were not.

Price concessions, time on the market, and the actual sale price of homes

This article examines the relationships between listing price concessions, time on the market, and the actual sale price of homes. The principal hypothesis that significant listing price concessions, usually the result of overpricing, can lead to real discounts on the final sale price is proven by our empirical results. We also found that the longer the time on the market, the higher the sale price, ceteris paribus. This finding is consistent with the theory that the longer a property remains on the market, the higher the probability is that a relatively superior selling price can be realized.

The Contributory Value of Trees to Residential Property in the Austin, Texas Metropolitan Area

Two methods for predicting the value trees contribute to residential property value in the Austin, Texas metropolitan area were tested. The formula method, used by professional plantsmen, and the predictive-modeling method, using regression analysis, were used to predict the value of trees on 120 homesites. The value of the homes ranged from $30,000 to $600,000 and represented homes typical of the Austin, Texas area. Trees on all homesites were evaluated with the ISA formula method and given a dollar value. Independent variables representing the house and lot were used in the predictive modeling method to determine the value that the trees contribute to sales price. The value of the trees derived by the formula method was found to represent 13 percent of the actual sales price of homes while the value of trees derived by the predictive modeling method represented 19 percent.

Impact of consumers' personal characteristics on hedonic prices of energy-conserving durables

Since the oil crisis of 1973, American consumers have made progress conserving energy, but the average home remains far short of its potential thermal efficiency. An incentive for investing in energy-conserving home improvements is the potential increment they make to the home sale price. Our purpose was to determine whether the addition that energy-conserving improvements made to home sale prices (hedonic price) varied with the demographic characteristics of the buyers. Nonpooled regression analysis was used to estimate the hedonic prices of the housing attributes for each group of consumers. The focus was on wall and ceiling insulation, as well as wood or vinyl window frames. The hedonic prices of these features tended to vary with consumers' ages, levels of education and per capita incomes, but not with household size.

The Exclusionary Effect of Growth Controls

Local government regulation of land development and homebuilding has become more complicated and more demanding in recent years. Most of the new control techniques can be used either to manage growth in an orderly way or to limit and discourage growth. A review of experience in Northern California reveals many instances in which techniques such as utility moratoria, development fees, growth quotas, environmental impact reviews, and environmental lawsuits have been used in ways that increase the cost of new housing. Among the direct cost impacts of growth controls, the most important result from the rapidly increasing development charges levied by many communities, and from the stretch-out of development time caused by local review procedures. Many growth controls also generate a series of indirect impacts likely to lead to far greater increases in the sales prices of new homes. Four indirect impacts likely to have major effects on house prices are redesign of housing developments to make them more acceptable to local interest groups; restriction of the supply of land available for homebuilding; restriction of competition among homebuilders; and reduction in the ability of homebuilders to increase their output during cyclical increases in consumer demand.

Land Value Taxation and the Rights of Property

HIGH LAND VALUE TAXATION tends to force good land into use and thus to make the rent of land lower. It offers more incentive to saving and to investment in the production of useful capital. It encourages increase of capital in the land-value-tax communities. It thus better provides labor with both land and capital, thereby makes labor more productive and tends toward higher wages. It lowers the expense of housing for those who must be tenants and lowers the sale prices of homes for would-be home owners. It makes easier, because less expensive, the providing of children's playgrounds and public parks. Why do our teachers and textbook writers in economics, with relatively few exceptions, either attempt to discredit the theoretical case for this reform while ignoring the impressive supporting data from Australia,' or else completely ignore the theory, the data and the subject? In this connection it may be especially appropriate to examine an objection to the land-value-tax policy, which seems to have been the one most stressed by the textbooks. The objection in question to introducing additional taxes on land values or to increasing taxes on land values relatively to other taxes, is that to do so would be unjust. A common way of putting the thought, has been to say that for a state or community to retain the rent of land might have been right and proper if this had been done from the very beginning. It could have been right, in this view, only if the policy had been begun when there was no land rent and when no one had paid for any land a sum based on any future expectations which the introduction of such a tax would-or might-prevent him from realizing. But, it is said, when men have purchased land on the assumption-based on custom and perhaps on very long custom-that it will not be taxed more heavily in relation to other property values or incomes in the future than it has been in the past, then the introduction of a land value tax system or of any relative increase of taxation of land values is unjust and, therefore, inadmissible.