Forest pests and home values: The importance of accuracy in damage assessment and geocoding of properties

We examine the impact of measurement errors in geocoding of property locations and in the assessment of Mountain Pine Beetle-induced tree damage within the proximity of a given residence on estimated losses in home values. For our sample of homes in the wildland-urban interface of the Colorado front range and using a novel matching estimator with Bayesian regression adjustment we find that both types of errors can lead to substantial biases in estimated losses. Our results confirm that the Forest Service's Aerial Detection Survey is generally too coarse to be informative for property valuation that depends on highly localized spatial data.