Urban railway transportation services are multi-dimensional. Not only providing a station where commuters take trains, but the services also include several factors such as the number of railway lines, the number of trains per day, whether the lines are directly connected to a metropolis, and the amount of time to reach major employment centers. Extending the traditional studies which analyzed the proximity premium on prices of housing in surrounding areas, this paper examines the capitalization effects of urban railway transportation services on housing prices.
Employing a hedonic pricing approach, we empirically estimated the capitalization effects using a sample of apartments located in 31 cities in Gyeonggi Province. We found that railway transportation services have significant capitalization effects on apartment prices in surrounding areas. Including railway transportation services variables in the hedonic price estimation improved the explanatory power of the model as much as 15.5 percent point. More specifically, apartment prices in surrounding areas are higher as the nearest railway station has more railway lines and more frequent trains. If a railway line directly connected to Seoul passes a station and as the time to reach major employment centers in Seoul from the station is shorter, prices of apartments in surrounding areas of the station are also relatively higher. All these findings suggest that, rather than constructing new railway lines, extending existing railway lines to frequently and promptly travel to Seoul and major employment centers in Seoul can provide more benefits to railway users in Gyeonggi Province.