The Relationship Between School Quality and U.S. Multi-family Housing Rents

Drawing on a sample, of U.S. multi-family apartment and school data from across 45 U.S. Core Based Statistical Areas, this paper examines the capitalization of school quality into apartment rents. It makes three contributions. First, in the context of the geographically diverse data, results tend to be consistent with individual market analyses in the extant literature though there is some important geographic variation. Second, capitalization patterns vary across measures of school quality and tend to consistent with observed patterns within the single-family oriented research including by region. Third, congruent with life cycle literature, multi-family renters appear, on average, to capitalize primary school quality to a greater extent than intermediate and secondary school levels. Results are robust when considering school choice and other inter-jurisdictional nuances or econometric techniques.