ABSTRACT
Valuing the built environment is a non-trivial exercise. It involves an understanding of both housing market dynamics and the effects of locational externalities upon house prices. This chapter draws together some of the key issues of the research and evaluates the empirical results with respect to the micro-economic theories of residential location and housing markets. Integral to this is an appreciation of the role of GIS in the integration and visualization of the data, and crucially, in the spatial analysis of the locational attribute data. The hedonic pricing method is very well established, particularly in North America. Locational externality effects have been a common concern in the urban economic literature and a particularly important concept of how the built environment is valued. Any questions concerning the resolution of house price data and the measurement of locational attributes has implications with the role of the Geographic Information Systems within hedonic research.
