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A new study released by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reveals that the view of wind farms does not appear to have a significant effect on the sale of houses.
The study investigated the sales of 7,500 homes between 1996 and 2007 located within 10 miles of 24 operational wind farms. These sales included homes within a mile of wind farms. Specifically, neither the view of the wind farm facilities nor the distance of the home to those facilities is found to have any consistent, measurable and statistically significant effect on home sales.
The study concludes that ‘although the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes have been or could be negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, they are either too small and too infrequent to result in any widespread observable impact’.
Criticism is made in the study to other surveys looking at the possible impact of wind energy projects on house prices. It claims that only a few studies included field visits to homes to determine wind turbine visibility and collect other important information about the home e.g. the quality of the scenic vista.
Jim Cummings
December 8th, 2009
This is indeed a good, comprehensive study, but a closer reading of the results shows that within a mile, there begins to be an effect on property values. On average, homes within a mile sold at 5% less than comparable homes without wind farms nearby. True, the sample size was too small to be statistically significant, but in the charts of correlations of price to all wind farm aspects considered, these cells stand out clearly (nearly all other correlations were zero to 1%). See website linked above for more comprehensive discussion of this study.
Most striking is that the apparent trend toward some property value effect largely mirrors surveys of residents near wind farms. The “problem” in interpreting this data and the surveys is that there is NOT a universal increase in annoyance or sleeplessness or dropping property values as you move closer to turbines; rather, there is an increasing MINORITY of neighbors who are negatively impacted. Again, see several posts at the AEInews.org site for more discussion of this; from 10% of neighbors at around a mile or so, increasing to 25% or so at a half mile, and perhaps 40% at a quarter mile, we are seeing the well-known individual variability in susceptibility to noise. It seems likely that the “small and infrequent” numbers of homes negatively affected in the study addressed here, are mostly concentrated near turbines, and may represent a similar percentage of landowners as report sleep disturbance and other noise impacts. If so, the 5% average price hit is apt to represent a much larger valuation drop in a quarter or so of the homes that are within a mile.
The authors of this study DID suggest that a top priority for further study is to focus on areas closest to wind farms; the challenge will be getting a large enough data set to cross the statistical significance threshold.