Research suggests a data center won't hurt a home's value, but sellers disagree: 'How low do I have to go to sell it?'

She’s even lowered the listing price from $925,000 to $799,000, but it hasn’t made a difference.

“How low do I have to go to sell it? And when do you know it’s the right time to say, ‘Okay, I’ll take whatever you offer,’ and run?” She told Marketwatch. “You don’t ever know when that’s the time.”

But new research from Realtor.com indicated that data centers don’t impact nearby housing prices.

So what gives? Where could this disagreement between data and lived experience come from? And why are data centers such a big problem for people in the first place?

There are more residential data centers than ever. New types of neighborhoods might bring new buyer priorities

Data centers have been around for decades — possibly longer than you think. But data center construction has exploded in the past few years to provide new infrastructure for resource-hungry AI models.

Realtor.com’s data indicate that in 2015, only 12 zip codes contained a large data center. By 2026, 125 zip codes contained a large data center — a tenfold increase. In that same time, the percentage of homes sold near large data centers doubled.

In that time, data centers expanded to be more rural, moving away from urban centers. People who never expected to be in the same neighborhood as a data center suddenly found themself with a whole new type of neighbor — and probably an unwelcome one, according to a Gallup poll.

Realtor.com determined that data centers didn’t impact home sale prices by comparing similar neighborhoods (one with a data center, one without) at four points: the year before it opened, the year it opened, the year after it opened, and two years after it opened.

But if it’s by necessity only surveying data centers that have been open for two years, then its data might lean less rural than data centers are now.

People who prefer rural neighborhoods might have different priorities than people who live closer to a big city, including preferring nature sounds over electrical or mechanical ones. For them, a new data center might be more of a no-go.