Paper
House Price Effects of Commercial Entry: Event Study Evidence from London
Authors
Wanqi Liu, Rong Zhao
Abstract
Restaurants, cafes, and other commercial amenities are among the most visible markers of neighborhood change, yet whether their arrival drives house price appreciation or merely follows rising demand remains an open empirical question. This study investigates the causal effect of commercial entry on residential property values in Greater London. Exploiting the staggered timing of 21,189 restaurant and cafe openings across 4,835 Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs)--identified through Energy Performance Certificate records--we implement an event study design with LSOA-specific linear trends that passes the parallel trends test (F = 1.04, p = 0.384). We find that house prices rise monotonically after commercial entry, reaching +4.1% at four years post-treatment (p < 0.01). The effect is gradual and cumulative, consistent with amenity capitalisation. By matching EPC records to Google Places API price tier data at the building level, we further show that the effect is driven by upmarket commercial entry (+7.4%, clean pre-trends) rather than budget establishments (questionable pre-trends, unreliable post-treatment effect), establishing that the quality of commercial clustering--not merely its presence--drives neighborhood price dynamics. Results are robust to heterogeneity-robust estimation, alternative treatment thresholds, broader commercial category definitions, and a permutation-based placebo test.
Metadata
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Raw Data (Debug)
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