Andrew Narwold

Estimating the value of the historical designation externality

Purpose – A long‐standing argument for historic preservation of houses has been the positive externalities that it produces. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the externality associated with the designation of historical houses in San Diego, California under the Mills Act.Design/methodology/approach – The Mills Act allows for individual houses to be designated as historically significant. This results in neighborhoods where historically designated houses are side‐by‐side with houses with no particular historic significance. The positive externality hypothesis predicts that the value of a house should be a function of the number of historically designated houses within the neighborhood. The proximity of historically designated houses on the sales price of other non‐historic houses is valued using hedonic regression analysis.Findings – The results suggest that a houses value is increased by 3.8 per cent by having a historical house within 250 ft, and by 1.6 per cent by having a historical home locat...

Valuing housing stock diversity

Purpose – This paper seeks to explore the roles that different measures of housing stock and socio‐economic diversity have on the value of residential homes in San Diego, California.Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a hedonic pricing model to estimate the effects of different measures of diversity on housing prices based on a sample of approximately 6,500 houses in San Diego County, California. The measures of diversity can be classified broadly as either socio‐economic diversity (racial and ethnic diversity, variation in income, education, age, etc.) or diversity in housing stock (variability in housing and lot size, the age of structures, the mix or single family and multiple family, etc.).Findings – The results suggest that home prices increase with greater diversity in the size of homes in a neighborhood, but tend to decrease with higher levels of diversity in the age of homes. In addition, there is evidence that smaller than average houses on smaller than average lots command a premium...

Short Sales and Residential Real Estate Prices

Previous research identifies a negative externality associated with mortgage foreclosures. Houses in the neighborhood surrounding a foreclosed property sell for less, all things being equal. This paper explores the effect of short sales on condominium prices in downtown San Diego, California. The neighborhood in this research is defined as the building in which the condominium is located. The results suggest that not only is there a short sale “discount”, but buildings in which there are a large number of short sales also experience a general decline in market prices of housing units.