Does Living Near a Good School Add Value to Your Home?

Every parent knows the phrase "good school catchment," and estate agents lean on it hard. But does living close to a school actually push up what a home sells for — and is it schools that matter, or universities too? We analysed 214,888 full-market Dublin sales on the Property Price Register from January 2010 to July 2026, measuring each home's distance to the nearest primary school, secondary school and university/college.

The raw numbers look huge — and partly mislead

Compare the median price of homes within 1 km of a school against those further away and the gap is dramatic: homes near a primary or secondary school sell for around 32% more. Homes near a university, oddly, sell for 11% less.

Some of that is the familiar trap: sought-after schools sit in leafy, expensive suburbs, while universities and colleges cluster in the city centre and student areas where homes are smaller and cheaper. So part of the raw gap is really about the neighbourhood. The question is how much survives once we strip the neighbourhood out.

Comparing each home only against similar homes sold in the same Eircode area in the same year, the school premium shrinks — but crucially it does not disappear. Primary school proximity holds a premium of about 10% and secondary about 9%, both statistically significant. The university effect stays negative. In our transport study the DART's headline premium vanished after this same adjustment; here, the school premium stands its ground.

Closer really is dearer

A genuine amenity effect should show a smooth gradient — the nearer you are, the more you pay — and for schools it's textbook. Homes within 250 m of a primary school have a median price of €568,000, easing to €465,000 at 500m–1km and €350,000 beyond 2 km. Secondary schools show the same steady decline. Universities slope the other way — prices rise with distance — confirming that the campus effect is about location, not desirability.

That clean, monotonic gradient is exactly what you'd expect if buyers genuinely value being near a school. It's a cleaner signal than we saw for any transport line.

What it means if you're buying or selling

• A good-school location is a genuine, sizeable premium. Roughly 8–10% of value is attributable to school proximity itself — more than double the Luas/DART effect.
• Family homes benefit most. The premium is strongest for the primary/secondary "school run" radius that families walk — a walkable school is worth paying for, and worth highlighting when selling.
• "Near a university" is not a selling point for value. Campus-adjacent homes skew to smaller, cheaper, rental-oriented stock; proximity there doesn't lift owner-occupier prices.

How we did it (methodology)

Data. Every residential sale in County Dublin on the Property Price Register from January 2010 to July 2026, restricted to genuine arm's-length sales (excluding "not full market price"), with prices trimmed to the 1st–99th percentile (€80,000–€2.2m) to remove bulk and mis-recorded sales. After geocoding, this left 214,888 sales.

Distances. Each home was matched to the nearest institution of each type using the geolocated positions of 45 key Dublin schools and universities. "Near" means the nearest one is within 1 km, measured as true geographic distance. Schools spanning both levels count as both primary and secondary.

The adjusted premium comes from a hedonic regression: we model the logarithm of sale price against whether the home is within 1 km of each institution type, plus a full set of Eircode-area fixed effects and year fixed effects. The model only ever compares homes to others in the same postcode area, sold in the same year, holding neighbourhood and the rising market constant. This used the 89,169 sales with an Eircode routing key, across 35 areas with at least 50 sales each, standard errors clustered by area. Adding property-type controls (house, apartment, etc.) on the subset where type is known gave the same result: primary +9.4%, secondary +7.3%, university not significant.

Limitations. This is an association, not proof of cause. Most importantly, our dataset covers 45 notable Dublin institutions, not every school — so this measures proximity to a key school, and likely overstates the effect a full schools list would show, since notable schools cluster in desirable areas in ways even area-level controls can't fully remove. Eircode areas are also fairly large, leaving some within-area differences uncaptured. We report the raw, dose-response and adjusted figures together so the confounding is visible rather than hidden.