The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics
Volume 28, Issue 2, Article 6 (Abstract)
Title:	Planes, Trains, and Automobiles; The Impact of Traffic Noise on House Prices
Author:	Marcel A.J. Theebe
Abstract:	Because of large planned infrastructural projects like expansion of the main airport and construction of high-speed railways, noise nuisance has become a national social topic in the Netherlands. Moreover, according to EU-guidelines, determination and enforcement of differentiated noise limits will be delegated from national to local government in the near future. The value of noise has never been this important. In this paper, we etimate the non-linear impact of traffic noise on property prices. The used data set is very extensive; over 100,000 sales transactions are studied, with many individual property characteristics, combined with noise levels for 2 million small 100 by 100 meter areas. We use spatial autocorrelation techniques to overcome the regular problems of traditional NIMBY-analysis performed by hedonic regression. In a rising market, we find that the impact of traffic noise ranges to 12 percent, with an average of about 5 percent. The discount varies across sub-markets, and is a non-linear function of the noise level.
Keywords:	traffic noise, property values, hedonic regression, spatial autocorrelation