The housing market value of public transport accessibility to employment in post-pandemic England

The rise in home/hybrid working post-pandemic across multiple countries has been linked to significant shifts in housing demand away from urban centres. This paper explores evidence for this shift through changes in the value placed on public transport services in house prices. We analyse changes across 74 travel-to-work areas in England using data from 2.6 million house sales listings combined with novel measures of public transport accessibility to employment (PTAE). Multilevel hedonic models capture changes in willingness-to-pay for PTAE at the Travel-to-Work Area level with meta-analysis models used to analyse variations between and within cities. Overall, there was a reduction in willingness-to-pay for PTAE post-pandemic but this was confined to smaller cities and those with lower housing affordability. Within cities, reductions were greater in locations better served by public transport and with greater potential for home/hybrid working though the latter was also confined to smaller cities and those with lower affordability. Results align with evidence on increasing trends of counter-urbanisation in the UK and Europe and pose challenges for future sustainable urban development policies but also highlight the variations between urban contexts.