Effects of Transportation Accessibility on Residential Property Values

The aim of this paper is to examine the relationship between the availability of transportation infrastructure and services and the pattern of house prices in an urban area and to assess whether public investment in transportation can modify residential property values. This study was developed for the Lisbon, Portugal, metropolitan area (LMA) as part of a broader study that intends to develop new value-capture financing schemes for public transportation in the LMA. The paper focuses on three central municipalities in Portugal (Amadora, Lisbon, and Odivelas), where these effects could be more easily measured because of the existence of a significant variability of public transportation services. The paper tries to determine, with different spatial hedonic pricing models, the extent to which access to transportation infrastructure currently is capitalized into house prices and isolates the influence of three different transportation infrastructures: metro, rail, and road. The results suggest that the proximity to one or two metro lines leads to significant property value changes. Results further indicate that the classic hedonic price model (ordinary least-squares estimation) leads to similar coefficient values of the local accessibility dummy variables compared with the spatial lag model and thus provides a steady basis to forecast the property value changes derived from transportation investment for the study area in the absence of a significant property value database.