Compositional and urban form effects on residential property value patterns in Greater London

Abstract

The objective of this research is to determine the role of urban street layout design in the process of shaping property values. The effect of spatial accessibility on rent is a classic finding of spatial economics. Using space syntax fine-grained spatial design analysis, which indexes the spatial centrality and accessibility, the patterns of property prices are analysed for a large contiguous sample of over 60 000 residential dwellings in a North London borough, using the council tax band as a proxy variable for the property price. Few studies have examined the effect of spatial contiguity on the housing sub-market classification. The findings demonstrate that the council tax band proxy is a good indicator of residential property sale prices. In addition, a hedonic model framework shows that spatial centrality and accessibility, as indexed by the space syntax spatial design analysis, accounts for the variations in residential property values for single and multiple dwellings when controlling for the property size, relative density and building age. Multivariate analysis is used to establish the weighting of the different variables. The single most important spatial factor is the property size, followed by the ambient density, the local and global spatial accessibility and the building age. Non-residential land use location, the proximity to main arterial roads and the associated traffic and air pollution are shown to inhibit the residential property location.