Graduated Flood Risks and Property Prices in Galveston County

Our hedonic property analysis approach in Galveston County, Texas aims at estimating the impacts of flood risks and water-related amenities in a more systematic way. First, we interact distance to the nearest coastline and flood risk in order to account for these impacts acting together on housing sales prices in our coastal community. Second, we use more granular flood risk measure in the analysis compared to the existing literature. Results show that the hedonic price effect is dependent upon the distance to the nearest coastline, and as expected the distance effect varies by flood risk type. We find that in this coastal housing market properties located in the highest risk flood area, for up to nearly a quarter mile from the nearest coastline, actually command a price premium. A recent movement toward risk-based flood insurance premiums in the United States was deeply opposed by the real estate sector for fear of causing property values to steeply decline. This analysis sheds some further light on this depressed property value assertion highlighting its sensitivity to distance to the water.