Trees can boost your home's value by tens of thousands of dollars, according to new research.  It's another reason why we need TEC's SOS Green Spaces campaign.  Sign the Petition

It's a fact that lush urban tree canopies improve property values, which just goes to show how dire the situation is for inner city streets and our western suburbs which have far fewer trees, and also face rising temperatures with increased health impacts from "heat island effect". 

TEC is working behind the scenes to ensure the Greater Sydney Commission's Draft District Plans for a "Green Grid" manifest where tree canopy is needed most. This means the Gladys Berejiklian Government must listen to the community, town planners, landscape architects, sustainable builders and local councils to create a liveable city.

As reported in SMH today, global engineering and urban design company AECOM analysed tree canopy coverage and five years of house price data in three Sydney suburbs: Blacktown, Willoughby and Annandale.

The company found that houses on streets with 10 percentage points more tree coverage were worth an average of $50,000 more than houses on less leafy streets in the same suburb.

The biggest difference was in Annandale, where the average canopy coverage is about 25 per cent: houses in streets with 35 per cent tree coverage were worth $61,000 more.

In Blacktown, where average canopy coverage is just 11 per cent, an increase to 21 per cent translated to a $55,000 increase in property value.

And in Willoughby, where the tree coverage is 28 per cent, trees provided less of a price uplift of $33,000 when the tree canopy was boosted to 38 per cent, according to the Green Infrastructure report – possibly because Willoughby is already quite leafy, so there is less relative impact from enhanced tree coverage.

"Obviously there's a huge amount of things that do impact land and property value," said the report's co-author, Roger Swinbourne "But this was really saying, 'let's stand back and see if there is a positive trend between where canopy cover exists and land values'."

Local governments are becoming more conscious of the benefits of street trees, as research finds tree canopy in the urban environment has important cooling and air filtering effects, as well as amenity, he said.

• Illustration: Cathy Wilcox 

They found that streets with 28 per cent canopy coverage in Annandale were 4 degrees cooler than streets with 20 per cent canopy coverage, for example.