With wind energy expanding rapidly, and with an increasing number of communities considering wind development nearby, there is an urgent need to empirically investigate common community concerns and thereby provide stakeholders in the siting process a common base of knowledge from which to work.  The concern that property values will be adversely affected by wind energy facilities is often put forth by stakeholders.  Although this concern is not unreasonable, given property value effects that have been found near high voltage transmission lines, landfills, and other electric generation facilities, the impacts of wind energy facilities on nearby home sales had not previously been investigated thoroughly.

The team of researchers for the project collected data on almost 7,500 sales of single-family homes situated within 10 miles of 24 existing wind facilities in nine different U.S. states, and that occurred between 1996 and 2007; the closest home was 800 feet from a wind facility.  The conclusions of the study are drawn from eight different hedonic pricing models, as well as both repeat sales and sales volume models.  A hedonic model is a statistical analysis method used to estimate the impact of house characteristics on sales prices.

None of the models uncovered conclusive evidence of the existence of any widespread property value effects that might be present in communities surrounding wind energy facilities.  Specifically, neither the view of the wind facilities nor the distance of homes to those facilities was found to have any consistent, measurable, and significant effect on the selling prices of those homes.  Though the analysis cannot dismiss the possibility that individual homes or small numbers of homes have been negatively impacted, it finds that if these impacts do exist, they are either too small and/or too infrequent to result in any widespread, statistically observable effect.

The final report can be downloaded here