Wind turbines lower real estate prices: Report

A study by the RWI - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research shows that wind turbines can lead to falling prices of single family homes in the immediate vicinity. The value of a house one kilometer away from a wind turbine drops on average by a good 7 percent. For the study, the RWI has evaluated almost 3 million sales offers on the online portal Immoscout24.

The most important results:

• Wind turbines that are built at a distance of one kilometer from a detached house lead on average to a price reduction of the property by 7.1 percent.
• With increasing distance from the wind turbine, the effect is reduced. At a distance of eight to nine kilometers, wind turbines have no effect on property prices.
• The researchers attribute the decline in the value of real estate to the negative effects of wind turbines on their immediate surroundings - for example due to noise and disruption of the landscape.
• As the RWI study shows, not all properties suffer the same loss of value: old houses in rural areas are hardest hit. Here, the loss in value within the one-kilometer radius can even be 23 percent. By contrast, houses in suburban locations hardly lose value at the same distance to a wind turbine. This could be because in urban areas disturbances of the landscape or noise are less noticeable than in the countryside.

"Even though wind power plays an important role in the success of the energy transition, the impact on real estate owners can be severe in individual cases," says Manuel Frondel, head of the Competence Center "Environment and Resources" at RWI. "The installation of a wind turbine can mean a loss of ten thousands of euros for homeowners."

For the study, the RWI has evaluated almost 3 million sales offers, which appeared in the period between 2007 and 2015 on the online portal Immoscout24. The impact on real estate prices was estimated using a hedonic pricing model that, in addition to many house characteristics and the socio-economic environment, takes into account the exact distance between the wind turbines and the single-family homes under consideration.

Contacts:
Prof. Dr. Manuel Frondel Tel: (0201) 81 49-204
Leonard Goebel (Press Office) Tel .: (0201) 81 49-210

This press release is based on the Ruhr Economic Paper # 791 "Low Cost for Global Benefit: The Case of Wind Turbines". It can be downloaded at this website or directly here as linku7 https://www.rwi-essen.de/publikationen/ruhr-economic-papers/976/ or directly here as a pdf-file. The results of the study were reported on the "World on Sunday" under the heading "wind power destroys real estate values".

The paper is in English. Translation of this press release was assisted using Google Translate.