The Economic Influence of Beach Nourishment on the Local Real Estate Market in Brunswick County, North Carolina

Abstract

Global climate change causes sea level rise and storm pattern changes, potentially worsening shoreline erosion. Growing risks of inundation and storm damage confronts coastal development. As an active countermeasure for years, beach nourishment alleviates such threat to local properties. Previous research has analyzed the dynamics of beach system with corresponding management strategies, the cost issue of beach nourishment, and the role of beach in a hedonic property model framework employing principles of renewable resource economics. Statistical analysis of local real estate market provides evidence on the effectiveness of beach nourishment in protecting local properties. By incorporating properties’ distance to shoreline as one independent variable and beach nourishment condition as dummy variable, the regression of properties’ sale price against housing characteristics suggests how beach nourishment alters the market trend underlying residential property transactions. As for Brunswick County, North Carolina, in this study, the regression results show that before beach nourishment, properties closer to shoreline were generally less favored, while after beach nourishment, shorter distance to sea becomes preferred. Because of limited sample size and thus no further detailed stratifying the properties according to the distance to shoreline, the regression results are not assertively robust in statistics after logarithmic transformation in the form of typical hedonic price function. Nevertheless, the statistically significant results of direct regression strongly suggest that beach nourishment contributes positively to the local real estate market for coastal properties.