Perceived Externalities of Cell Phone Base Stations: The Case of Property Prices in Hamburg,Germany

We examine the impact of cell phone base stations on prices of condominiums in Hamburg, Germany. This is the first hedonic study on this subject for housing prices in Europe and the first ever to examine the price impact of base stations within a whole metropolis. We distinguish between individual masts and groups of masts. On the basis of a dataset of over 1000 base stations set up in Hamburg, we find that only immediate proximity to groups of antenna masts is perceived as harmful by residents of nearby condominiums. For individual masts no effect on residential property prices in the surrounding areas was observed, indicating that cell phone service providers should prevent installation of groups of masts in a single location. We control for spatial dependence and show that the influence of cell phone base stations on adjacent residential property prices can be overestimated, if other negative externalities that are typically correlated with the proximity to base stations are neglected.