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Beauty in the Eye of the Home‐Owner: Aesthetic Zoning and Residential Property Values

Real Estate Economics

Published online on

Abstract

This article empirically confirms one core motivation for architectural zoning: Shape homogeneity among neighboring homes increases the value of residential buildings. Drawing on large‐scale shape and transaction data, this study first develops a data‐driven measure of architectural similarity, condensing three‐dimensional shapes to univariate shape distributions. These algorithm‐based similarity estimates are good predictors of human perceptions of shape similarity and are linked to property attributes and transaction prices. For the city of Rotterdam, a price premium of approximately 3.5% is estimated for row houses within very homogeneous ensembles over buildings facing heterogeneous neighbors.