It’s a common belief that when a Latter-day Saint temple goes in, property values around it spike.
If you thought that, you’re not wrong. But you’re not right either.
Data scientist Alex Bass looked at 42 U.S. temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and 15 years of Zillow data. His new analysis, posted at Mormon Metrics, found that home values in those temples’ zip codes outperform the national average by 22%.
But there’s a big caveat. Bass found a selection bias.
His analysis shows the church chooses sites in zip codes that are 35% wealthier, 69% more educated and 447% more populous than the average zip code before the announcement is made.
“And so most of these things are predictors of good home value appreciation,” he said. “And so when you control for these baseline demographic characteristics, the temple effect essentially vanishes.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Ciara Hulet: It makes a certain sort of sense, right? The church builds temples where there are people to attend and staff them.
Alex Bass: Oh, absolutely. It makes sense from a lot of angles. You want people to attend the temple. And so you, of course, you're going to put the temple in areas where there are more people. You probably want the temple to, you know, be less likely to be defiled, like somebody do graffiti on it or something, and that's perhaps less likely in an area where there's less crime.
CH: Has this home value data been crunched before?
AB: So there have been a few studies done in the past, but none have looked at as many temples as I have looked at. We looked at 42 different temples and all that have been announced in the U.S. since 2011.
If someone were to ask me, oh, you know, “Should I invest in a home in a city where a temple is going to be built or next to a temple?” I would say, “Oh, yeah, absolutely.” But not necessarily because the temple is going to dramatically increase your home value, but because the temple is a lagging indicator of, you know, favorable trends in appreciation and economic growth.
CH: If the church is building in already growing places, do temples have any effect on home prices then?
AB: You know, one of the things I looked at in my study as well is I filtered to temples in different regions in the United States. Because, you know, perhaps in Utah or Idaho, where there are a lot more Latter-day Saints…
CH: …who would probably want to live by a temple more than someone who's not a member.
AB: Exactly. So I broke it down by region, and I still found null results. I did find a slightly positive effect in the areas that are greater than 30% LDS, so that's going to be in the Mountain West region, where that is true, but it was not statistically significant. So it's not differentiable from zero.
But directionally, it was positive, suggesting that if I had more years of data, or if I had a higher-powered study, perhaps I could detect a modest effect of 3% to 5%. But a premium of 10% to 20% at the community level for a temple is just a myth.
