Impact on Property Values

To obtain the impact of office development on houses and land adjacent to the Marshall Tract, I analyzed some houses (75) in Lost Creek that had three different kinds of backyard neighbors - other houses, office buildings, and green belt. I used the Travis County CAD system to examine the 2013 appraised value for the house and the land. I normalized them to the square feet of the house and the size of the land (acres). Houses with swimming pools were eliminated from the analysis.

The findings of this analysis were:

• House appraisals were independent of location
• Land appraisals depended on location
• Land  with greenbelt behind it was appraised 13% higher than land with houses behind it.
• Land with offices behind it was appraised 9% lower than land with houses behind it.