Listing behaviour in the Italian real estate market

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The main purpose of this paper is to explore the listing behaviours of agents and sellers. In particular, the paper analyzes listing prices and the predicting power of the house features described in advertisements, to improve their use in real estate valuations. In Italy, selling prices are not public information and therefore listing prices play a key role for market analyses and are used by real estate companies and appraisers for estimating house values. Design/methodology/approach -A traditional hedonic model was used to measure the overall contribution to listing price of the characteristics described in advertisements. The analysis was performed both on houses put on the market by agents and on houses put on the market by sellers. Listing price distributions and their deviation from normality were analyzed. Furthermore, a hedonic analysis was performed, which consisted of two steps. First, the coefficient of determination for any characteristic was computed. Second, the overall contribution to the listing price of the characteristics described in advertisements was measured. Findings -The analysis shows the presence of factors which affect listing prices and which are not revealed to buyers in real estate advertisements. On the other hand, the presence of characteristics that do not affect the listing price but are described in advertisements was also found. Furthermore, agents and sellers showed different behaviours. While the marginal contributions of each characteristic estimated on a sample of houses put on the market by agents were significant, the analysis reveals that listing prices of houses put on the market by sellers are not explained by the house features. Originality/value -To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to propose a hedonic approach to exploring the major determinants of listing prices of houses on sale on the Italian market. The listing behaviour of agents and sellers and the predicting power of the observable characteristics could address the use of listing prices in real estate valuations. At the same time, the potential presence of unobservable factors that affect the listing price could be a source of bias in es...

Monitoring and Analysis of the Real Estate Market in a Social Perspective: Results from the Turin’s (Italy) Experience

“…A following study [11] explores the listing behaviours of agents and sellers, by analyzing the listing prices and the predicting power of the house features described in advertisements. A traditional hedonic model is performed both on houses put on the market by agents and on houses put on the market by sellers [12].…”

Assessing Social and Territorial Vulnerability on Real Estate Submarkets

“…The importance of market segmentation for price prediction is confirmed in [58], and is empirically supported by [36,37], who analysed the city of Turin.…”

“…The relation between Microzones and property prices has been deeply studied in several studies [36,37], while the HTU's influence in the real estate market has been recently analysed in [38] but needs to be more investigated.…”

“…Furthermore, in Italy house prices are commonly measured in Euro per square meter by buyers, sellers and real estate institutional web sites. We therefore decided to consider the variables' influence on prices measured in Euro per square meter, as outlined in other studies, which analysed the Italian real estate market [35][36][37][38][39]42].…”

“…Nevertheless recent studies showed that the use of listing prices for studying the real estate market and estimating house values is viable. This is due to the fact that agents and sellers tend to correctly determine property prices and predict the influence of observable characteristics of buildings and apartments in the process of price determination [35][36][37][38][39].…”