Integrating lidar, GIS and hedonic price modeling to measure amenity values in urban beach residential property markets

Hedonic property price models have been used extensively in the economics literature to measure the value households place on locating properties close to a given resource, such as a beach, river, or lake. This proximity premium consists of two components. First, property owners derive benefit from living close to the resource for access purposes. Second, they also derive benefit from the view of the resource. Critical to the analyses is the identification and measurement of these two components. We augment previous research by providing more accurate and objective measures of access and view for urban beach residential properties. Using GIS, we calculate the distance from each property to the nearest designated public access point. Using lidar data, we calculate the ocean view from each property. These measures are then integrated into a hedonic property price model to disentangle and estimate households’ willingness to pay for beach access and view.