Title: Impact of Train Station on Commercial Property Values
Description: Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is becoming more and more popular for cities to alleviate urban problems. One of the factors to achieve a successful TOD is to have a good public transportation in place and a vibrant commercial development surrounding it. A way to finance TOD is through a public private partnership called Transit Joint Development (TJD), which essentially captures the land value as the access to public transportation brings more value by bringing higher population movement around the area. Many studies have been done over the past two decades on the effect of train stations impact on property values but results are still inconclusive. In addition, many studies have used a global model in the form of Hedonic Pricing Method. This global model method does not account for spatial nonstationarity, which leads to overestimation, underestimation, or no significance in property value’s relationship to accessibility to train station in the exact location of the study area. Thus, due to the global model method being too general, real estate developers, urban planners, and policy makers would not be able to utilize the results to choose the right locations for TJD and maximize its land value capture potential.

This thesis asks the questions Does rail transit have a significant impact on commercial property values in Los Angeles? If so, does this impact vary in terms of space? And is Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) a more suitable model than Hedonic Price Method for determining the impact of train station accessibility on commercial property value? This thesis tackles the problem of spatial nonstationarity by using Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR). Los Angeles County is used to study this relationship between commercial property values and train stations accessibility. The thesis uses the global regression model first and then GWR method to study the spatial variance. The result of this study has shown that commercial property values in Los Angeles County are significantly impacted by the accessibility to rail transit stations. The global model has shown that within the whole study area, all the commercial property values decreases by $9.67 per square feet as it gets closer to the train station nearby.

However, when the data is put into the GWR model, the results have shown that the impact is not spatially consistent throughout the study area. In fact, it varies significantly, ranging from a decrease of $9.70 to an increase of $22.31, which indicates that not all commercial properties within the study area are negatively impacted when located within a mile of a train station, as the global model have indicated. And thus, GWR is proven to be a better method in estimating the impact of train stations on commercial property values. With GWR model results, the increments in commercial property values surrounding the station can be used by developers and urban planners to decide whether doing a TJD in a certain location will be feasible for both parties.