By Dr. Maurice Yeates and Steven Farber

This research monograph explores a fundamental issue that has not been dealt in any detail in either the professional or academic literature.  It is a truism to suggest that shopping centre and residential development are inextricably linked.  Moreover, from an urban planning perspective, the shopping centre internalizes many of the negative externalities associated with shopping.  Yet, the importance of this assumption as measured by relationship between residential property values and shopping centre closeness has not been rigorously tested.

The report should be of interest to those researchers with an interest in economic and statistical modeling.  It provides a comparison between the use of the standard hedonic price model and a statistical modeling technique known as Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) in examining the spatial association between housing prices and access to community regional and power centres in the Greater Toronto Area.  In total, a network of 100 community centres, 29 regional malls and 27 power centres and over 19,000 housing transactions were uses in the analysis.  The results of the analysis suggest that malls and power centres do marginally affect residential property values, but the larger malls appear to have the greatest impact.