Mahbubul Alam, PhD

Mahbubul Alam, PhD

Forest economist turned data scientist; trained in environmental-economic modeling

Apartment Rents 15% Higher Near Metro Stations

1 minute read

Published:

Introduction

This is a quick peek into my #MicroDataScience work on housing/real estate topics. Overall I am interested in to what extent metro stations affect housing rent. For this I chose two metro stations – one is Franconia-Springfield in the south of DC and the other is Vienna-GMU in the west of DC, both in northern Virginia. The metro stations serve 4 cities in the dataset: Franconia/Mt Vernon (Franconia-Springfield metro), Vienna/Oakton (Vienna-GMU metro). Apartments within 20 minutes walking distance to metro stations are assumed to take advantage of higher rental benefits (if any).

Data and sample

A non-random sample of 100 apartments were chosen, of which 45 apartments are within walking distance to metro stations and 55 are outside. Apartment rents were picked up from Zillow website.

Main results

Mean apartment rents near metro stations (within 20 minutes walking distance) is USD 2,266 and apartments farther away is rented out at USD 1,893 per month. This means you need to be ready to pay an additional amount of USD 300 if you want to take advantage of metro stations for daily commutes. To generalize (if I may): apartment rents are 15% higher near metro stations than local average.

Caveat: 20 minutes walking distance cut-off is an arbitrary assumption, I didn’t look for any empirical evidence for that.

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