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It won’t add as much as a new bathroom, but having a Bixi stand close to your house can improve its resale value, a group of McGill researchers has found.

A study done by McGill’s School of Urban Planning and published in the April edition of the journal Transport Policy, found that having 12 bicycle sharing stations within 800 metres of a home adds 2.7 per cent to its resale value.

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The study analyzed repeat sales of homes between 1996 and 2012 on the island of Montreal, and after filtering out all other factors, it found that each nearby bicycle-sharing station added $709 to the average sale of a multi-family home (apartment, condo, duplex or triplex, and row houses). Single-family homes and townhouses were excluded from the study because there were not enough multiple sales of those types of homes for them to be statistically relevant.

The study found that the median number of Bixi stations located in an 800-metre radius of homes within the bicycle-sharing network was 12.26. That means the average home located in the bicycle-sharing network saw its resale value rise by $8,649.80 due to Bixi, according to the study’s calculation. That represents a 2.7 per cent increase.