The impact of rail transport on real estate prices: an empirical analysis of the Dutch housing market

A hedonic pricing model is estimated based on sales data from three metropolitan areas in the Netherlands (Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Enschede) to analyse the effect of railway accessibility on house prices. Railway accessibility is measured by both the distance to a railway station and an index of quality of railway services provided at the station. Two railway station considerations were taken: the nearest railway station and the most frequently chosen railway station. Correcting for a wide range of other determinants, the model based on the most frequently chosen station outperforms the model based on the nearest railway station in estimating the effect of railway accessibility. The dissimilarity between the results of the two models increases with the increase in the urbanisation level of the metropolitan area. generally on accessibility, and particularly on railway accessibility. Accessibility as provided by rail in particular has received some atten-tion in the literature. Railway accessibility is generally explained in relation to railway stations. In order to single out the effect of railway stations on property values, it is sug-gested that stations should be regarded as nodes in a transport network and places in an area (Bertolini and Spit, 1998). Using this 1