Airport noise impact on property values : case of Suvarnabhumi Airport

Abstract

Not unlike other airports around the world, Suvarnabhumi International Airport is also faced with complaints of noise generated by aircrafts approaching and taking off from the airport. The airport noise affects quality of lives of people who live and work in nearby areas as well as prices of properties in the areas. Since the airport operation began in 2006, property owners in the airport vicinities have protested and demanded for monetary compensation for their deteriorated quality of lives. The objective of this study is to examine the problem by assessing the discount in housing prices due to the impact of Suvarnabhumi Airport noise. A series of hedonic regression models of property values are developed and estimated based on a data set of 37,539 new house sale records transacted between 2002 and 2008. To test the hypotheses about the impact of the airport, the hedonic models contain two features that could quantify the magnitude of noise effects and the beneficial effects of transportation access improvements. The results confirm that there was no impact of airport noise on property prices before the opening of airport, but the impact became negative and significant after 2006. Specifically, there is on average a 25.9% discount in price of new properties located between NEF 35 and 40 contour lines and 9.53% discount for property located between NEF 30 and 35 contour lines. These estimates can be translated to a noise depreciation index (NDI) of 3.27% per dB, which is in the high range compared to NDI estimates in the previous studies of Europe and North America.