The effect of Auckland's Metropolitan Urban Limit on land prices

This research note estimates the impact of Auckland’s Metropolitan Urban Limit (MUL) on land values in the greater Auckland region. Building on the work of Grimes and Liang (2009), it uses a quantile regression to assess the impact of the MUL on land prices by decile. This allows the impact of the MUL to be assessed in terms of both the central tendency (e.g. median) and the dispersion (e.g. lower or upper quartile). The results indicate that Auckland’s MUL has significantly increased land prices in general, but with a relatively larger impact on land prices in the lower part of the distribution.