Michiel Daams

The Effect of Natural Space on Nearby Property Prices: Accounting for Perceived Attractiveness

This paper estimates the effect of attractive natural space on Dutch residential property prices. We operationalize attractive natural spaces by combining land use data with unique data on the perceived attractiveness of natural spaces. In our main results, the effect of attractive natural space on property prices falls from 16.0% for properties within 0.5 km, to 1.6% for properties up to 7 km away. Our findings advance existing hedonic studies by verifying that economic benefits of living near natural space extend over a larger distance. This has important implications for public policy regarding investment in natural space near residential areas. (JEL H41, Q51)

Living Near to Attractive Nature? A Well-Being Indicator for Ranking Dutch, Danish, and German Functional Urban Areas

While nature is widely acknowledged to contribute to people’s well-being, nature based well-being indicators at city-level appear to be underprovided. This study aims at filling this gap by introducing a novel indicator based on the proximity of city-residents to nature that is of high-amenity. High-amenity nature is operationalized by combining unique systematic data on people’s perceptions of what are the locations of attractive natural areas with data on natural land cover. The proposed indicator departs from the usual assumption of equal well-being from any nature, as it approximates the ‘actual’ subjective quality of nature near people’s homes in a spatially explicit way. Such indicator is used to rank 148 ‘cities’ in the Netherlands, Denmark, and Germany. International comparability of the indicator is enhanced by the use of a definition of cities as functional urban areas (FUAs), which are consistently identified across countries. Results demonstrate that the average ‘nearness’ of FUA populations to high amenity nature varies widely across the observed FUAs. A key finding, that complements insights from existing city-level indicators, is that while populations of FUAs with higher population densities may live relatively far from nature in general, they also live, on average, closer to high-amenity nature than inhabitants of lower density FUAs. Our results may stimulate policy-debates on how to combine urban agglomeration with access to natural amenities in order to account for people’s wellbeing.

Leveraging Real Estate Education with Students’ Real-World Observations: A Diary Approach

This paper discusses how real estate education can benefit from letting students keep a scientific diary. This scientific diary approach entails that, as a complementary course activity, students keep a diary in which they reflect on any real estate related news, projects, daily observations or policies that fascinate them or attract their attention or curiosity. Personal curiosity, while a fundamental driver of science, often lacks a formal role in real estate courses. As such, diaries may help, in a modest way, to enrich the classroom as well as the teacher’s perspective on the thoughts and personal development of students. In this paper we frame specific pros and cons of the diary approach within the educational literature, whilst paying special attention to the traditional lecture approach and the recently popular flipped classroom approach. To empirically illustrate what real estate diaries may bring about, the current study offers a content analysis of the entries in diaries kept by two cohorts of students of the University of Groningen Master’s program of Real Estate Studies and a cohort of students of the George Washington University School of Business MBA program. We show results of a systematic categorization of the 200+ diary posts as to their content and form. We conclude with a discussion of the possible merits of this approach. One of these merits is a broadening of the topics that students study within the (pre-fixed) study program. Another is that recent events, impossible to be captured in textbooks and academic literature, are actively connected to. The openness of the diary approach may help to make students’ own-level thinking about real-world observations more serious, in small steps, through a process of exploration and writing. In addition, diaries can be discussed in-class in a group setting, under the teacher’s supervision, in order to share observations and discuss knowledge- claims. This practices the framing of real-world observations within existing theory as well as the assessment of whether alterations to theoretical models are needed to understand the observation at hand. We hypothesize that practice of this type of reflection on fresh issues in the ‘daily real estate life’ of students may lead to a stronger connection between their academic training and the professional field of real estate.