Proposed SEDeF model as a panacea for residential neighbourhood crime towards boosting housing values

• Main Authors: Olajide, Sunday Emmanuel, Lizam, Mohd, Kasim, Rozilah
• Format: Article
• Published: American Scientific Publishers 2018
• Subjects: HD Industries. Land use. Labor; HD1361-1395.5 Real estate business
• Online Access: http://eprints.uthm.edu.my/5597/

Literature revealed that property crime is capable of constituting big threat to residential property investment. Hence, no effort should be considered insignificant towards curbing its soaring. Therefore, the aim of this research is to propose socio-environmental design factors (SEDeF) model as a panacea to residential neighbourhood crime with a view to boosting residential property value. One Thousand (1000) sets of structured questionnaires were administered on the residents of residential estates within the South Western States of Nigeria out of which 467 were found usable after data screening. Purposive and systematic sampling techniques were adopted while structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to determine the impact of social risk factors (SRF) and environmental design factors (EDF) on residential neighbourhood crime (RNC) as well as the impact of RNC on residential property value (RPV). The data, having passed through various screening stages which included missing data, outlier, reliability test, multicollinearity, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and the structural model which was found to be fitted, revealed a significant P-Value of the three main hypotheses which interpreted to the fact that social risk factors (SRF) and environmental design factors (EDF) are capable of influencing residential neighbourhood crime and that residential neighbourhood crime was significantly impacting on the residential property value with values less or equal 0.001. The policy implication of the research is that the residential property investment could be boosted if the residential neighbourhood crime is curbed using social risk factors and environmental design factors.