The Understanding of Landscape Preference, Using Real Estate Appraisal as an Analyzing Tool

Along with urban development, the concept, preference, and ideality of aesthetics change, which could be related to the change of culture, education, age, etc. In fact, it is difficult to understand well about the direct relationship between them, but it is undeniable that people incline to live in places making them feel pleased, which may include places with good views, natural environment, or forest parks. All of these are part of good landscape, therefore the topic is to understand what kind of qualities people would prefer and choose to live there. According to the literatures, there is an association of nature with safety in subconsciousness, so people may prefer being close to natural environment, and if this kind of residential areas are more popular, the real estate may be higher consequently. In addition, experts keep mentioning "good landscape can have a huge impact on real estate appraisal in a positive way", There are some existing researches also bringing out this phenomenon.(Oh and Lee; Cats-Baril and Gibson; Gao and Asami) The methodology is using the existing researches of the relationship between landscape quality and real estate appraisal as data source, and translating those to GIS data. When digitizing the data, the focus is the common criteria related to good landscape and the appraisal per square feet, which may be easier to analyze and represent. Overlapping the preference layer with others, like population density, education level, jobs, etc, which are secondary data and can be found from censuses, the result could be shown as spatial pattern and may have some interesting applications, for example, people could search for a new home according to its proximity to a desired landscape type/feature, or a selection of new homes might be compared according to proximity to key landscape features.