Re-Examining the Property Price Premium Around ‘Better’ Schools

The established consensus from a large worldwide literature is that access to a ‘better’ school increases local property prices, which is typically interpreted as reflecting parents’ demand for school quality. We show that this relationship does not hold universally. Using data on English secondary schools, we show that price premiums are concentrated in the minority of areas where the difference in quality between schools is large, and weak or absent elsewhere. Exploring other dimensions of heterogeneity, we find that households pay comparable premiums to avoid schools at the bottom of the quality distribution as to reach the top, conditional on the size of the quality gap. A sufficiently affluent school peer group is a necessary condition for higher attainment to raise prices, suggesting that households value a bundle of school attributes.