Picture or Playground: Valuing Coastal Amenities

As the world continues to urbanise, understanding housing market preferences can help planners accommodate the growth of cities. Housing is a bundle of both structural attributes and locational amenities, with “blue space” coastal amenities including both aesthetic (picture) and recreational (playground) services. We examine the effect of these different “blue space” coastal amenities, using both a novel measure of views, suitable for large datasets, and a dataset of almost 500,000 real estate listings, covering both sale and rental markets in Ireland for the period 2006-2017. We find that proximity to beaches and similar shorelines is rewarded in both sale and rental markets, as is the breadth and depth of sea-views. There is no evidence that urban sale or rental price premiums are larger (or smaller) than rural ones. However, there is clear evidence that sale price premiums are typically larger than their rental equivalents. In addition, sale price premiums are larger in times of falling prices, a finding consistent with “property ladder” effects in tighter markets.