Urban Trees Can Increase Property Values
Peter Duinker, Halifax Tree Project
2021-02-03
The prospect that having trees on or adjacent to one’s urban property can increase the value of the property, by which we mean the sale price, is extremely difficult to measure. www.moneysense.ca (OK, not the kind of literature I would normally rely on in science!!) says that a well-chosen, well-located tree could raise the value of a house by more than $19K. Let’s see what Google Scholar presents as scholarly papers for evidence.
Using a photo-based survey method in the Netherlands, Staats and Swain (2020) estimated that house prices were about 5% higher when a street was well populated by trees as opposed to having no trees. Donovan and colleagues (2019) studied the same question in Tampa and found that a one percentage point increase in a neighbourhood’s tree canopy was associated with increased house prices by almost $10K! In that study, the location of the tree canopy in relation to the house was not as important as was the overall neighbourhood’s tree canopy. Finally in this sampling, Donovan and Butry (2010) estimated that house prices in Portland, OR, were almost $9K higher because of the presence of street trees.
So, the MoneySense number is in the right ball park. Now let’s look at some neighbourhood situations and imagine how trees might fit into property valuation. The key in my opinion is the state of the trees. Consider the case of the trees on Oak and Poplar Streets in Powell River, BC. I featured these streets in an earlier post entitled “Urban Trees Can Prolong the Life of Things Manufactured and Built” (Oct 2020). The streets were planted with oak and poplar trees, respectively, at the time of neighbourhood establishment (about a century ago). If the house sizes and designs on the two streets were identical when built, they would doubtless have fetched the same prices in the first decades. Today, a hundred years later, there are no trees on Poplar St. and beautiful old oak trees lining Oak St. Wouldn’t you pay a bit more for a house on Oak St.? I would.
The message here is that the street trees need to be of considerable size before they have the positive house-price effect. You can get an instant effect if existing mature trees on the lot are kept through the building process (an approach all too often ignored by property developers, but apparently not Bruno on the pictured lot in southend Halifax!). However, you can’t get that effect in the streets where any existing trees had to be removed and you must start the tree population from scratch. Having a new street tree in front of a house is a pleasant thought at the time of purchase, but probably doesn’t add much to the price at the moment (as per the photo below). Considering that you can’t get a big tree unless you have a small one first, it’s vital to get trees planted in the street as soon as possible in anticipation of diverse, long-term future benefits. If a street tree could mean anything to the house price, I suspect there is a relationship between tree size and the lift in house price – first of all, a big tree is much more noticeable than a small one, and second, a small one is much more readily achieved with a new planting than is a large one.
I live in a well-treed neighbourhood (see my aerial photo from Oct 2003). There are plenty of backyard and street trees now, but there probably were virtually none when the neighbourhood was built a century ago. The average spacing of street trees is roughly 12.5 metres, making for about 8 trees per 100 metres of street (per side, that is). So, while we could have more street trees (I’d like to see the density closer to 12 trees per 100 metres), most homes have a tree in front and those that don’t have a street tree, or two, very close by. So I think Donovan’s neighbourhood effect will be operative in my neighbourhood.
I have probably taken the tree canopy around my house to a level most people would consider to be overshoot. When we purchased the house in 2002, there were five semi-mature Norway maples in the backyard and a young black locust near the front. In the tree lawn directly in front of the house is a fine mature American elm (see the photo of the deep-blue house). So already I had a robust tree canopy serving the property. Having an affection for long-lived Acadian tree species, I set about a program of tree establishment and replacement. Three of the Norway maples and the black locust have been removed, and from 2002 to 2010 I have planted one of each of the following species: red oak, sugar maple, eastern hemlock, eastern white pine, red spruce, yellow birch, white birch, and European beech (I chose a European beech because it is resistant to the beech bark disease). The beech is in the tree lawn out front (small tree at the left of the photo) where it will become the replacement for the elm when the latter finally succumbs to a storm or old age. In the near future I expect to cut down the white birch (leaning too far over the neighbour’s property) and the red spruce (just not faring that well – too close to the yellow birch).
I have made this transformation in vegetation on my property not to increase its sale value but because I love trees – as many as I can get, of “good” species, right close to me. However, if this all translates into a higher sale price for the house in the event that it must be sold (bringing me, my wife, or our estate the financial winnings), well that’s a great side benefit! I will have to make sure that the real-estate agent profiles my forest as well as the house!!
References
Donovan, G.H. and D.T. Butry. 2010. Trees in the city: valuing street trees in Portland, Oregon. Landscape and Urban Planning 94(2):77-83.
Donovan, G.H., S. Landry, and C. Winter. 2019. Urban trees, house price, and redevelopment pressure in Tampa, Florida. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 38:330-336.
Staats, H. and R. Swain. 2020. Cars, trees, and house prices: Evaluation of the residential environment as a function of numbers of cars and trees in the street. Urban Forestry and Urban Greening 47:126554.