Measuring the importance of location in house price appreciation

This paper examines the variation in the rates of price appreciation within an individual metropolitan market. A methodology is developed to examine the locational variation in house price changes in Dade County (Miami) Florida, from 1971 to 1992. House price appreciation appears to be somewhat spatially related; that is, it varies by municipality, with distance from the CBD, with local changes in population and housing units, and by ethnic mix. However, these relationships have minimal explanatory power. Controlling for the census tract group location of each home explains only around 12% of the (residual) variation in the appreciation of individual homes that is not explained by metropolitan-wide changes in house prices. The effect of tract group location appears to be dominated by the idiosyncratic influences of individual homes and their immediate environments. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.