Intra‐Urban migration and housing submarkets: theory and evidence

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s a group of housing economists at ColumbiaUniversity developed a framework for the analyses of urban housing markets which was based around the concept of housing submarkets and household migration. There is now widespread agreement amongst housing economists that submarkets should be adopted as a working hypothesis but the concept has been reformulated in terms of intra-urban relative house price differentials. The accepted test for submarket existence uses a hedonic model of house prices which assumes market equilibrium. This paper returns to an analysis of submarkets which focuses on spatial migration patterns. By examining household intra-urban mobility patterns in the Glasgow housing market it is possible to demonstrate that submarkets tend to be self-contained. The analysis also suggests that the current standard statistical tests may be incomplete and in the case of Glasgow underestimate the number of submarkets.

Residential Living Structure as a Basis for the Spatial Delineation of Residential Submarkets

“…There is a body of literature in which the spatial component of submarkets are thought to be important, but are assumed to conform with existing administrative boundaries such as suburbs, postcodes districts, local government jurisdictions, electoral boundaries and other forms of a priori definitions proposed by real estate agents and other land professionals (Adair et al, 1996;Bourassa et al, 2002;Jones et al, 2004). In studies based on a priori definitions, separate submarket status is based on the now accepted test for submarket difference laid down by Schnare and Struyk (1976) as generating significantly different hedonic house price models based on structural property attribute data.…”

A multivariate unobserved component analysis of US housing market

“…Jones et al (2004) and Clayton (1996) focus on markets within a city. Jones et al (2004) investigates the role of submarkets in analyzing intra-city housing market dynamics in Glasgow, UK.…”

Spatial housing economics: A survey

“…Heterogeneity measures the extent to which local markets exhibit structural variations, because of different household characteristics in each location or property types. This provides one approach to the measurement of housing market areas (Jones et al, 2004;Leishman, 2009;Maclennan and Tu, 1996). The use of regional or other administrative area data sets that do not correspond to local housing market areas will often introduce spatially correlated errors.…”