Sports stadia in a real estate context: The case of the Emirates Stadium in London

Abstract

The present research aimed at making two parallel contributions. First, assessing the inherent characteristics of a football stadium and then appraising its impact on housing prices. The stadium of interest was the Emirates Stadium, the home of Arsenal Football Club in Islington, a London’s Borough.
The first part comprised the development of a grading model that intended to capture the potential of attraction of the stadium, according to the sport performance. It resulted in poorer performance for the Emirates Stadium (74.86%) than its counterpart the Stamford Bridge Stadium (90.69%). An investigation on the key features of the Emirates Stadium development was also undertaken in this part. It was found that the stadium development had positive effects on the Islington Borough, with new residential stock, transport enhancement but also in terms of image. However, one of the inherent characteristic of such an amenity is its NIMBY status at a local scale.
The second part of the search was focused on the use of a difference-in-difference (DiD) regression to assess if there was an effect of the Emirates Stadium on housing prices in the Islington borough. Three different regressions were done in order to refine the data being modelled. The three regressions resulted in a negative impact in the housing prices for the Islington borough. As a consequence, the two research were complementary and enabled to have a global image of the impact of the Emirates Stadium on the Islington borough: in terms of exposure, Urban Development, and housing prices. But such methods can be improved by the addition of other factors in the grading model, or taking into account distance to the stadium to make several DiD regression.