Who cares about Walk Scores? A quantile approach to residential house prices and walkability

The housing market has become more diversified in recent years to reflect changing housing preferences. Although home buyers’ preference toward single-family detached homes, the least compact form of housing, still remains strong, the demand and support for compact and walkable communities have been increasing during the past few decades. This paper empirically examines the distribution of demand for walkability using quantile regression analysis of housing market data in King County, WA. Recent literature has emerged that looks at the housing market and uses house prices to infer the value residents place on neighborhood characteristics including walkability. In hedonic methods house prices are estimated as a function of measures reflecting the quality of the neighborhood that the house in question is located in, along with numerous other characteristics describing house attributes such as the number of rooms, bathroom, size and others. A majority of empirical studies on this topic examines the average behavior. The average effects as estimated by OLS conceal considerable heterogeneity in demand for walkability due to the “aggregation” of families’ differential willingness to pay. In this paper we use quantile regression to estimate the extent to which differences in walkability, as measured by Walk Score, can explain the variability in property values at different points in the distribution of house price.