Valuing housing and green spaces: Understanding local amenities, the built environment and house prices in London

This report is an update of a previous GLA Economics study- ‘Valuing Greenness: Green spaces, house prices and Londoners’ priorities’- published in 2003. The previous study used a hedonic modelling approach to assess how the amount of green space within wards in London affected house prices, whilst taking into consideration other influential factors such as transportation accessibility and housing density. The hedonic pricing method is based on the theory that the value of a good is based on the combination of the many attributes the good possesses. In the case of housing this includes domestic facilities, access to services and so on. The value of individual attributes can be inferred from the hedonic model, and thus it is a useful method for estimating the value of attributes that influence house prices, particularly where markets do not exist such as for green spaces. This research builds on the original study with better green space data and a wider range of built environment and locational factors analysed at a more detailed spatial scale