The impact of historic district designation on the prices of single-family homes in the oldest city in the United States, St. Augustine, Florida

Abstract

This empirical investigation applies a hedonic pricing model to estimate how much historic district designation has influenced the sales price of single-family houses in the oldest city in the United States, namely, St. Augustine, Florida. There were sufficient data in this context to study a total of 4017 single-family houses for a 6-year period from 2008 to 2013. The semi-log and piecewise regression estimations reveal that the natural log of the sales price of a single-family house in the city of St. Augustine was positively affected by designation as national historic district in six of the seven districts, with robust results obtained for five of the districts. Moreover, the estimated premiums for historic designation were larger than those found in other similar studies, most of which were conducted prior to the Great Recession. This study also derives several other conclusions about the effects of recession variables, as well as other exterior characteristics, interior characteristics and spatial control variables, a number of which are not commonly explored in similar studies.

Keywords:

• Housing prices
• historic district designations
• hedonic pricing model
• housing market
• recession

JEL classifications:

• R14
• R13
• R11

Notes

1. At the very least, the piecewise experiment serves as a good robustness test for the semi-log findings.