The influence of the image of a place on residential location choice

Abstract

Individuals may approach and choose environments conveying positive meanings and avoid environments conveying negative meanings. However, in actual situations individuals take constraining factors into account such as cost in terms of money, time, and effort. The present study examines the influence of the affective meaning of an environment on individuals' behaviors in actual situations where these behaviors also entail costs. 174 students rated 22 target sites with information about the time taken to commute to work and/or the rent on two scales: desire to live there and willingness-to-pay (WTP). Multiple regressions showed that the image of many places had a significant impact on both the desire and the WTP after differences in the time to commute to work and the rent were statistically eliminated. The strong correlation between the actual rents used for the desire to live model and the predicted values taking the effect of the image of a place into account proves that the actual rent reflects the image of the place to a certain degree.