The Value of "Green" in Resale Residential Real Estate: Premium by Neighborhood Value Quintile, Homestead Status and Year

Abstract

This paper evaluates about 146,000 home sales from the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) of Bexar County (San Antonio), Texas, from January 2009 to April 2019 to measure the extent that a home's selling price reflects a Green premium which is identified in the MLS. We exclude new houses from this analysis. For the span of our data, we find a 4.2% increase in the sale price of Green homes, holding other features constant. When evaluated by Area (approximate selling price quintile), we find premiums of 6.9%, 5.7%, 1.2%, 3.5%, and 5.3% by order of increasing neighborhood value quintile. When assessing Homestead versus Non- Aomestead homes, we find a premium of 2.8% for Homesteads and 6.4% for Non- Homesteads. Considering the time trend, we found the premium starting under 3% in 2009 and increasing to a little over 5% where it remained for three years and decreased to about 4% in 2014 where it remained through the end of the data in 2019.