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The purpose of this paper is to provide a dating system for the Italian residential real estate market from 1927 to 2019 and investigate its interaction with credit and business cycles.

To detect the local turning point of the Italian residential real estate market, the authors apply the honeycomb cycle developed by Janssen et al. (1994) based on the joint analysis of house prices and the number of transactions. To this end, the authors use a unique historical reconstruction of house price levels by Baffigi and Piselli (2019) in addition to data on transactions.

This study confirms the validity of the honeycomb model for the last four decades of the Italian housing market. In addition, the results show that the severe downsizing of the housing market is largely associated with business and credit contraction, certainly contributing to exacerbating the severity of the recession. Finally, preliminary evidence suggests that whenever a price bubble occurs, it is coincident with the start of phase 2 of the honeycomb cycle.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the honeycomb approach has been tested over such a long historical period and compared to the cyclic features of financial and real aggregates. In addition, even if the honeycomb cycle is not a model for detecting booms and busts in the housing market, the preliminary evidence might suggest a role for volume/transactions in detecting housing market bubbles.

The challenge of accessibility to adequate housing in several countries by a large percentage of citizens has given rise to different housing programs designed to facilitate access to affordable housing. In South Africa, the National Housing Finance Corporation (NHFC) was created to provides housing loans to low- and middle-income earners. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the implication of the macroeconomic risk elements on the performance of the NHFC incremental housing finance.

This study used a mixed-method approach to examine the time-series data of the NHFC over 17 years (2003–2020), relative to selected macroeconomic indicators. Additionally, this study analysed primary data from a 2022 survey of NHFC Executives.

This study found that incremental housing finance addresses a housing affordability gap, caters to disadvantaged groups, adapts to changing macroeconomic conditions and can mitigate default risk. It also finds that the performance of the NHFC’s incremental housing finance is premised on the behaviour of the macroeconomic elements that drive its strategy in South Africa.

Unlike previous works on housing finance, this case study of the NHFC considers the implication of macroeconomic trends when disbursing incremental housing finance to low- and middle-level income earners as a risk mitigation measure for the South African market. Its mixed method use of quantitative and qualitative data also allows a robust insight into trends that drive investment in incremental housing finance in South Africa.

Drawing on the literature on professional ignorance, here defined in affirmative terms as the capacity to act regardless of the incompleteness of available information in organizations and professional communities, the article reports empirical material from an urban development project wherein policy makers' instructions are vague and, in certain domains, inconsistent with market conditions.

Urban development projects regularly include uncertainty and risk taking, and policy makers' stated objectives regarding project goals may be incomplete or merely signal a political ambition. In such situations, first-line project participants need to make decisions as if uncertainties regarding policy objectives are manageable and preferably minimal. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the proposition that professional ignorance is a key mechanism in incomplete or imperfect governance systems.

Project participants actively questioned policy but acted on the instructions just the same, which is indicative of how professional ignorance is supportive of governance system that relies on first-line market actors and agencies to implement also incomplete or vaguely stated policy objectives. Incomplete policies derive from challenges in political deliberation and bargaining processes, uncertainty regarding the future and shifting preferences among policy makers and constituencies more widely. In practice, incomplete policies regularly include issues for first-level actors (e.g. on the urban development project level) to handle and to reconcile in their day-to-day work.

On basis of an empirical study of a major urban development project, the study contributes to a growing literature that recognizes the value of professional ignorance in governance systems and in project management practice. The study invites further scholarly research that takes an affirmative of professional ignorance but without overlooking its risks and potential malfunctions.

This study aims to provide a framework for assessing the technical condition of a house to determine its market value, including the identification of other price-setting factors and their statistical significance. Time on market (TOM) in relation to the technical condition of a house is also addressed.

The primary database contains 631 houses, and the initial asking price and selling price are examined. All the houses are located in the Brno–venkov district in the Czech Republic. Regression analysis was used to test the influence of price-setting factors. The standard ordinary least squares estimator and the maximum likelihood estimator were used in the frame of generalized linear models.

Using envelope components of houses separately, such as the façade condition, windows, roof, condition of interior and year of construction, brings better results than using a single factor for the technical condition. TOM was found to be 67 days lower for houses intended for demolition – as compared to new houses – and 18 days lower for houses to refurbishment.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is original in the substitution of specific price-setting factors for factors relating to the technical condition of houses as well as in proposing the framework for professionals in the Czech Republic.

This study aims to explore the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates on housing rent by considering multiple vacancy durations.

This research uses smart meter data to measure unobservable vacant houses. This study made a significant contribution by applying building-level smart meter data to housing market analysis. It examined whether vacancy duration significantly affected apartment rent and whether the relationship between apartment rent and vacancy rate differed depending on the level of housing rent.

The primary finding indicates that there is a significant negative correlation between apartment rent and vacancy duration. Considering the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates, the apartment vacancy rates of surrounding buildings did not show any statistical significance. Moreover, quantile regression results indicate that although the bottom 10% of apartment rent levels showed a negative correlation with all vacancy durations, the top 10% showed no statistical significance related to vacancies.

This study measures the extent of spatial externalities that can differentiate taxation based on housing vacancies.

The findings indicate that landlords have asymmetric information about their buildings compared with the surrounding buildings, and the extent to which price adjusts for long-term vacancies differs depending on the level of apartment rent.

As a crucial institutional form established since the Chinese economic reform, the system of competitive local governments has been shaping the characteristics of China's socialist market economy to a considerable degree.

This study not only adopts the view of existing studies that attribute the economic motive of local governments to rent and consider land public finance as a means through which local governments carry out strategic investment but also attempts to further develop the view within a Marxist analytical framework.

As a result, the local governments have helped to maintain an incredibly high investment rate over a considerable period of time, facilitating the continuous, rapid growth of the Chinese economy.

This study concludes that China's local governments function as the productive allocator and user of rent in the strategic investment based on land public finance and thereby embed themselves in the relative surplus-value production initially arising from competition amongst enterprises, forming the dual structure of relative surplus-value production unique to China's economy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an empirical model for house price spillovers between real estate markets. The model is presented by using data from the US-UK and London-New York housing markets over a period of 1975Q1-2016Q1 by employing both static and dynamic methodologies.

The research analyzes long-run static and dynamic spillover elasticity coefficients by employing three methods, namely, autoregressive distributed lag, the fully modified ordinary least square and dynamic ordinary least squares estimator under a Kalman filter approach. The empirical method also investigates dynamic correlation between the house prices by employing the dynamic control correlation method.

The paper shows how a dynamic spillover pricing analysis can be applied between real estate markets. On the empirical side, the results show that country-level causality in housing prices is running from the USA to UK, whereas city-level causality is running from London to New York. The model outcomes suggest that real estate portfolios involving US and UK assets require a dynamic risk management approach.

One of the findings is that the dynamic conditional correlation between the US and the UK housing prices is broken during the crisis period. The paper does not discuss the reasons for that break, which requires further empirical tests by applying Markov switching regime shifts. The timing of the causality between the house prices is not empirically tested. It can be examined empirically by applying methods such as wavelets.

The authors observed a unidirectional causality from London to New York house prices, which is opposite to the aggregate country-level causality direction. This supports London’s specific power in the real estate markets. London has a leading role in the global urban economies residential housing markets and the behavior of its housing prices has a statistically significant causality impact on the house prices of New York City.

The house price co-integration observed in this research at both country and city levels should be interpreted as a continuity of real estate and financial integration in practice.

The paper is the first research which applies a dynamic spillover analysis to examine the causality between housing prices in real estate markets. It also provides a long-term empirical evidence for a dynamic causal relationship for the global housing markets.

This paper aims to investigate the presence of a housing bubble using Swedish data from 1986Q1-2016Q4 by using various methods.

First, the authors use affordability indicators and asset-pricing approaches, including the price-to-income ratio, price-to-rent ratio and user cost, supplemented by a qualitative discussion of other factors affecting house prices. Second, the authors use cointegration techniques to compute the fundamental (or long-run) price, which is then compared with the actual price to test the degree of Sweden’s housing price bubble during the studied period. Third, they apply the univariate right-tailed unit root test procedure to capture bursting bubbles and to date-stamp bubbles.

The authors find evidence for rational housing bubbles with explosive behavioral components beginning in 2004. These bubbles do not continuously diverge but instead periodically revert to their fundamental value. However, the deviation is persistent, and without any policy correction, it takes decades for real house prices to return to equilibrium.

The policy implication is that monetary policy designed to contain mortgage demand and thereby prevent burst episodes in the housing market must address external imbalances, as revealed in real exchange rate undervaluation. It is unlikely that current policies will stop the rise of house prices, as the growth of mortgage credit, improvement in Sweden’s international competitiveness and the path of interest rates are much more important factors.

The purpose of this study is to analyse the trends regarding housing segregation over the past 10–20 years and determine whether housing segregation has a spillover effect on neighbouring housing areas. Namely, the authors set out to determine whether proximity to a specific type of segregated housing market has a negative impact on nearby housing markets while proximity to another type of segregated market has a positive impact.

For the purposes of this paper, the authors must combine information on segregation within a city with information on property values in the city. The authors have, therefore, used data on the income of the population and data on housing values taken from housing transactions. The case study used is the city of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden. The empirical analysis will be the estimation of the traditional hedonic pricing model. It will be estimated for the condominium market.

The results indicate that segregation, when measured as income sorting, has increased over time in some of the housing markets. Its effects on housing values in neighbouring housing areas are significant and statistically significant.

A better understanding of the different potential spillover effects on housing prices in relation to the spatial distribution of various income groups would be beneficial in determining appropriate property assessment levels. In other words, awareness of this spillover effect could improve existing property assessment methods and provide local governments with extra information to make an informed decision on policies and services needed in different neighbourhoods.

On housing prices emanating from proximity to segregated areas with high income differs from segregated areas with low income, policies that address socio-economic costs and benefits, as well as property assessment levels, should reflect this pronounced difference. On the property level, positive spillover on housing prices near high-income segregated areas will cause an increase in the number of higher income groups and exacerbate segregation based on income. Contrarily, negative spillover on housing prices near low-income areas might discourage high-income households from moving to a location near low-income segregated areas. Local government should be aware of these spillover effects on housing prices to ensure that policies intended to reduce socioeconomic segregation, such as residential and income segregation, produce desirable results.

Furthermore, a good estimation of these spillover effects on housing prices would allow local governments to carry out a cost–benefit analysis for policies intended to combat segregation and invest in deprived communities.

The main contribution of this paper is to go beyond the traditional studies of segregation that mainly emphasise residential segregation based on income levels, i.e. low-income or high-income households. The authors have analysed the spillover effect of proximity to hot spots (high income) and cold spots (low income) on the housing values of nearby condominiums or single-family homes within segregated areas in Stockholm Municipality in 2013.

Acknowledging that housing forms a large part of households’ and country’s long-term wealth, the South African Government has implemented various housing-related policies towards that end. Among these, the government has extended transfer duty exemption to house buyers – both individuals or natural persons and companies or other parties – to enable them buy houses of their choices since January 1950 to date. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between historical transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the City of Johannesburg (CoJ) over a longer period, where a comprehensive data set on house sales and other predictors was available.

This paper uses multi-year data on repeat house sales from 2010 to 2020 and other macro- and socio-economic variables to test the relationship between transfer duty exemption and housing demand in the CoJ, a core part of Gauteng province, South Africa. After cleaning the original data, final analysis was based on 139,121 repeat sales transactions. Data was analyzed in R.

Findings suggest that, when macro-, socio-economic and yearly effects are controlled, transfer duty has a damping effect on housing demand in the CoJ. The results were consistent across all the estimated models. While the motivation behind the implementation of transfer duty exemption in South Africa continues to encourage home ownership, these findings are unexpected because they do not offer support to that policy intention. These unexpected results are partly explained by the prevailing complexities of the housing market and related policies and the progressive tax regime. However, there are welfare effects that all buyers achieve across the housing market ecosystem.

This paper extends work on housing markets research in South Africa through the investigation of mortgage-based housing market in the CoJ that presents one of the densest, developed, bustling and growing housing market in the country. It also presents a fertile ground where all the effects of all the housing policies coalesce – in the statistical sense, one can control the effect of some aspects of housing policies, while appropriately testing the link between a specific policy (in this case, transfer duty exemption) and housing dynamics.