Context and Approach

North Carolina is building NC-540, a beltway through Raleigh’s suburbs in Wake County. The most recent portion opened in 2012, primarily serving the towns of Apex, Cary, and Morrisville. The next portion of NC-540 is expected to open in 2023, and will primarily serve the towns of Holly Springs, Fuquay Varina, and Willow Spring.

My project seeks to answer: how might the NC-540 highway impact home values when it opens in 2023?

This project is also personally motivated: my partner’s parents live in Wake County and NC-540 will open in their town next year. Occassionally they wonder aloud how the new highway will affect their home’s value. My analysis will try to answer their question.

Image: NC DOT 2022

Data

My analysis uses the following datasets, all provided courtesy of Wake County:

• Wake County Real Estate data: Records of all real estate sales in Wake County up to November 2022. I filtered this dataset down to 104,058 single-family homes in six towns of interest:
  • Highway towns: Towns that already have access to NC-540: Apex, Cary, and Morrisville
  • Non-highway towns: Towns slated to gain access to NC-540 in 2023: Holly Springs, Fuquay Varina, and Willow Spring
• Wake County Real Estate address points
• Wake County highways
• Wake County planning jurisdictions
• Raleigh neighborhoods
• Raleigh-Durham Airport Zoning

The towns for this study are mapped below by highway status. Note, Willow Spring is unincorproated and has no formal, mappable boundary. Willow Spring is located southeast of Fuquay Varina. NC-540 is highlighted in bright blue.

Home prices already vary in the area. The map below shows the sale price for a 5000-home sample of our real estate dataset.

Methods

My process to answer my research questions was as follows:

• Identify similar homes in both highway and non-highway towns using a K-means cluster analysis.
• Evaluate the difference in home values between otherwise similar homes in highway and non-highway towns. The difference can therefore be attributed to the presence of the highway.
• Build a regression model to predict home values based on proximity to the highway.
• Predict my in-laws’ new home value using this model, based on their distance to the incoming highway.