Nearby bike-share might just raise your home’s value
A study of Montreal’s Bixi program suggests property values rise near bike stations.

TheStar.com
June 29, 2015
Ben Spurr

Having a bike share station outside your front door might do more than give you a convenient way to ride to work — it might also boost the value of your home.

According to a new study from McGill University, residential units in Montreal are worth more if they’re close to a Bixi station, Montreal's bike share program. In neighbourhoods served by the program, the value of a typical home increased by 2.7 per cent.

Leader author Ahmed El-Geneidy, an associate professor at McGill’s School of Urban Planning, admits the results are “surprising,” but he’s convinced they reveal a causal relationship.

The study didn’t look at whether there’s a similar effect on Toronto properties. But Jared Kolb, executive director of the bike advocacy group Cycle Toronto, said the findings add to “an array of arguments that is supporting a much broader and much greater expansion for the public bike system here in Toronto.”

“If property values are going up, then property taxes are also going up,” which is good for the city budget, argued Kolb. He claimed the study shows that bike share systems are not just a social good, but have returns in “real, hard dollars.”

The McGill study is believed to be the first to measure a bike share system’s effect on home prices and will be published in the journal Transport Policy.

El-Geneidy and two colleagues examined 2,419 units in Montreal duplexes, triplexes, row houses, apartments and condos that were sold multiple times between 1996 and 2012. Controlling for other variables, they found that each Bixi station within 800 metres increased a typical unit’s value by $709. The average home within Bixi’s coverage area had 12.2 stations within 800 metres, increasing its value by $8,649.80.

El-Geneidy attributed the Bixi-boost effect to Montreal’s strong cycling culture. Although Bixi has endured financial problems since launching in 2009, as of May it had amassed nearly 36,000 members and expanded to 460 stations in Montreal, Longeuil and Westmount. Bixi’s presence in a neighbourhood is now seen by many bike-loving Montrealers as a net positive, and “they’re willing to pay a very small amount more,” El-Geneidy said.

Toronto’s bike share system is much smaller, with only about 4,300 members and 80 stations. Marie Casista, head of Bike Share Toronto, concedes it would probably have to become a more established part of the transportation network to influence home prices.

“This is a very small system compared to Montreal,” she said. “I just don’t think the bike share system in Toronto, as it stands right now, has the ability to influence property values.” But if the system expanded, “there’s a possibility that Toronto could see the same increase.”

Not everyone is convinced. Gordon Sommerville, principal appraiser at Toronto-based Home Value Inc., is “extremely” skeptical that bike share stations affect property values. He questioned why homebuyers would pay thousands extra to live near a bike share station when they could simply buy their own bike for a few hundred dollars.

Sommerville said a surefire indication that bike-share programs are affecting values would be if they started showing up in real estate listings alongside other selling pointssuch as access to parks, schools, or public transit. So far, in Toronto at least, that isn’t the case. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a listing that featured it,” he said.