Coming Soon: The "Temple Premium": Fact or Folklore?
Come back next week for the free public release of the full report
We’ve heard the claim. “They just announced a temple in [City Name]. Property values are going up!”
Real estate agents promise it. Homebuyers fear it. Speculators may bet on it. But does the data actually back it up?
For the past few months, I’ve been building a rigorous causal inference model to shed more light on this topic. I didn’t just look at one or two famous examples. I analyzed 15 years of Zillow data across 42 different temples to separate the hype from the reality.
Next week, I’m releasing the full report. We are going to answer the questions nobody has hard numbers for:
🏛️ The Jackpot: Does a temple announcement actually trigger an immediate price spike?
🌎 The Zion Curtain: Do temples affect prices differently in highly LDS neighborhoods vs. the rest of the country?
💸 The Investment: Is buying land near a future temple a smart bet, or a statistical trap?
I found the results enlightening and am excited to share them with you.
Dropping 7am MT on 30 January 2026. See you then!
Ooh, this is going to be interesting!
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I also wonder if there's a chicken-and-egg thing. I know prices have shot up in Montpelier, Idaho, for instance, but rich Utahns have run out of room on the south side of Bear Lake so maybe they were going to start buying in Idaho anyway. And maybe that's part of the reason a temple was put there? After all, there's one very close in Logan and one even closer in Wyoming. People in Montpelier were perplexed when the announcement was made.