Assessing amenity effects of urban landscapes on housing price in Hangzhou, China

A beautiful urban landscape has a significant effect on the environmental quality of a city by providing sites for people's daily leisure and entertainment and by bringing people psychological pleasure. With Hangzhou as a case city, housing hedonic price models are developed using explanatory variables from four dimensions, namely, structure, neighborhood, location, and landscape to quantitatively evaluate the amenity effect of various landscapes on housing price. Empirical results show that the West Lake, the Qiantang River, parks, mountains, rivers, and lakes have significant effects on the housing price. Urban residents are evidently willing to pay an additional price on environment amenities. When the distance to the West Lake and to a nearby park increases by 1%, the housing price decreases by 0.229% and 0.052%, respectively, whereas the park area increases by 1%, the housing price increases by 0.008%. The housing price increases by 6.965 or 7.897 ten thousand yuan, respectively, when the house is located less than 0.5 km from the Qiantang River or 1 km from a lake. The proximity to a mountain or a river increase the prices of surrounding houses, by 9.479 or 3.360 ten thousand yuan. (C) 2015 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.