The Price of Victory

The Olympic Games have come to be viewed as an unprecedented opportunity to leverage a short-term event into a long-term positive legacy. Although the Olympics are assumed to yield economic benefits, there has been no rigorous analysis of the impact of hosting on residential real estate markets. Utilising a substantial dataset for six host cities and comparable cities between 1984 and 2000, this paper employs an adjusted interrupted time-series approach to estimate the house price impacts of hosting the Olympic Games. The results suggest that the Olympics are not a ‘one size fits all’ economic development strategy and that potential outcomes are dependent on a number of factors, including the co-ordination of planning and Olympic-related development and the relative scale of the total Olympic investment.