Quantifying the Cost of Delay in Floodplain Property Buyouts

Flood hazard mitigation programs increasingly rely on property buyouts and home elevation, yet participation remains sensitive to program design details that affect household constraints. This study estimates homeowner preferences for buyout and elevation program attributes using a stated-preference discrete-choice experiment administered to N = 1560 homeowners, in which each respondent completed up to 4 choice tasks with 3 alternatives (Buyout, Elevation, and Neither). Choices are modeled in a random-utility framework with a multinomial logit as the primary specification and a mixed logit as a robustness specification. Observed choices favor Buyout (51.2%) over Elevation (29.6%) and the status quo (19.2%). In the estimated utility model, higher buyout offers increase acceptance, longer payment delays significantly reduce acceptance, and longer time to vacate increases acceptance; the acquisition option feature also raises buyout utility. These timing effects imply economically meaningful offer-equivalent tradeoffs: at representative baselines, an additional month of payment delay requires approximately a 6.45 percentage-point increase in offer (as a share of home value) to maintain acceptance, while households would trade about 8.02 percentage points of offer to obtain one additional month to vacate. Heterogeneity results indicate lower baseline participation among low-income respondents and attenuated marginal benefits of longer vacate time among respondents reporting damage. Respondent-level cross-validation shows stable predictive performance and similar accuracy across MNL and mixed logit models. The results highlight that accelerating payments and offering flexible time to vacate can increase program uptake, and that complementary supports may be needed to reduce participation barriers for economically vulnerable households.