The external impacts of historic landmarks and buildings on townhouse prices in Vietnam

Purpose - This paper aims to explore the external spillover effects of landmarks and buildings with historic preservation designation in Vietnam, a country marked with a unique property right regime and market transparency. The study contributes to the existing debate over the impact of distance to historic preservation sites and landmarks and property prices. Design/methodology/approach - The study examines property data of 274 attached townhouses in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and estimates the spillover effects of historic preservation on property prices collected during 2018–2019. The authors test for spatial autocorrelation by using the Global Moran’s I and Lagrange Multiplier diagnostics and deploy different spatial regression models including SAR, SEM and SDM. Findings - The authors find that there is a premium on the prices of townhouses near formally designated landmarks and buildings. This premium decreases monotonically away from the historic sites. However, this paper also demonstrates that there is a non-linear (U-shape) relationship between housing premium and the distance to the nearest historic building. Originality/value - This study is the first to take advantage of the surveyed property data to study the external impacts of historic preservation designation on housing prices in Vietnam. The study also contributes to the ongoing scholarly debate over the direction of the impacts. The study suggests that similar to other amenities, the price effect of designation tends to fade away after a certain distance.