Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on private rental housing prices in Turkey

Abstract

Rent prices have a strong relationship with economic factors in addition to the structural and environmental characteristics of housing stocks. Previous research demonstrated that impacts of unexpected and sudden circumstances such as war and epidemics on urban housing markets relate to their effects on the economy. Following the first COVID-19 case in Turkey, which was officially announced on 11 March 2020, changes in both housing preferences and economic structure have significantly affected the rental housing market due to the pandemic conditions. To highlight challenges in the rental housing market, this study addressed how the COVID-19 pandemic has influenced rental housing prices in 81 provinces of Turkey using the big data set of Endeksa, a private real-estate platform in Turkey. The data set was descriptively analyzed through four main periods identified on the basis of changing COVID-19 pandemic regulations and implementations in Turkey. Average rent prices of Turkish provinces during the identified periods were compared using ArcGIS 10.6. to show how private rent prices changed during the pandemic. The findings demonstrated that the unit rent prices generally increased from March 2020 to December 2021 throughout the whole country. Furthermore, the findings highlighted that while metropolitan cities have the highest unit rent price, the highest rent price rise occurred in provinces located in Central and Eastern Anatolia. This study contributes to the literature on how sudden shocks such as pandemics affect rent prices in free rental markets. In addition, it shows how the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the rental housing market differ from country to country by revealing the increasing trends in Turkey.

The COVID-19 pandemic and Google Search Trends

“…The finalised queries were selected for mental health, job search and financial markets categories based on the thorough review of the literature and using the “Related Queries” tool application on the Google Trends interface (Hu et al , 2020). Lastly, RSV data were obtained for five mental health-related terms: “anxiety”, “depression”, “insomnia”, “stress” and “suicide” (Cao et al , 2020; Cénat et al , 2021; Pappa et al , 2020), three job search-related terms “jobs”, “job openings” and “job vacancies” (Blustein et al , 2020; Hensvik et al , 2021) and four financial terms: a leading stock market index, namely, DJAI for the USA, FTSE100 for the UK, Sensex for India and S&P500 for global (Ramelli and Wagner, 2020; Costola et al , 2021), “mortgage loan” (“loan” in India), “fixed deposit” [1] and “rent” (Uddin et al , 2022; Hasan et al , 2021; Subaşı and Baycan, 2022) from Google Trends webpage (https://trends.google.com/trends/) accessed on 28 June, 2020. The daily number of confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths data was obtained from the Harvard Dataverse database (https://dataverse.harvard.edu/) accessed on 30 June 2020.…”

Konut İşlem Haci̇mleri̇ Araciliğiyla Konut Pi̇yasasinin Mekansal Anali̇zi̇: Menteşe, Muğla

“…Furthermore, since the COVID-19 epidemic began, there has been an increase in housing mobility to accommodate changing trends in housing unit attributes such as being located in a warm climate, with a garden or an open space, etc. (Subaşı andBaycan, 2022: 1181). Yet, higher housing demand and having several Special Environment Protection Areas, historical, archaeological, and natural sites, geographic thresholds have limited the range of urban development in terms of available space.…”

Why Did Housing Prices Rise to a Record Level in Turkey? An Empirical Analysis

“…The main reason for the decrease in housing prices was shown to be the suppressive role of unemployment and uncertainty and the pessimistic expectations created by quarantine measures on direct demand (Francke & Korevaar, 2021). Subaşı and Baycan (2022), in their study where they measured the reaction of rental prices to COVID-19 in Turkey, showed that rental prices rose from March 2020 to December 2021. Ahsan and Sadak (2021) attributed the increase in rent and housing prices to the increase in demand created by state supports and by the low interest policy implemented by the government during the pandemic period.…”