What’s A View Worth? Quantifying Visual Amenities’ Value in Real Estate

How much is a view of nature worth? What about good design? Landscape architecture and interior design are critical disciplines in any new build or big renovation, and they prioritize the visual experience of and from a building, but researchers and investors actually know very little about “the value of aesthetics” in real estate. And visual amenities rarely show up in underwriting models. But what you see matters: New research indicates simply having a view of open space can add 5% to 7.5% to a home’s value, easily $15,000 or more.¹

The prevailing assumption - admittedly one we shared before writing this article - has been that open space adds value to real estate because of its proximity as a recreational amenity. And maybe, we thought, residents and tenants might value being near an open space that plays an important ecological role, like a pollinator garden. These presumptions have dominated the research as well; prior work has been “unable to disentangle” the value of proximity vs. the stand-alone value of views, since “defining the degree of visual amenity is a difficult task,” the researchers note.