Welcome to the sixth issue in the seventeenth volume of the International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis. These four papers have been submitted via “regular issue” submission pathway however are as diverse as all papers published in this journal.
The first paper from India examines factors that influence the housing and real estate buying behaviour of young adults. These includes factors such as website quality, materialism, psychological factors, hedonic value and social media. The study also measures the mediating effects of social media influences between psychological factors and hedonic value and also young adults’ impulsive housing and real estate buying behaviour. The methodology was based on a questionnaire approach with the responses analysed via structural equation modelling. The findings indicate that materialism, psychological factors and also social media have a considerable impact on the impulsive housing and real estate buying behaviour of young adults. Furthermore, website quality and hedonic value did not have an observed large impact on young adults’ impulsive housing and real estate buying behaviour.
The aim of the second paper from Australia is to develop a house price forecasting model relating to the impact of neighbourhood effect on property value. The methodology used a multi-level modelling (MLM) approach to develop the house price forecasting models. In addition the neighbourhood effects, being socio-economic conditions as observed in various locations, are included in the study. The data was based on local government areas (LGA) in Greater Sydney. The outcomes confirmed that multi-level models can account for neighbourhood effects and also provide accurate forecasting results. It should be noted that the impacts on specific households may differ because of price differences in various geographic areas. Furthermore the concept of a “neighbourhood” is an important consideration in housing purchase decisions. When increasing housing supply provisions to match the housing demand, governments could consider improving the quality of neighbourhood conditions such as transportation, surrounding environment and public space security for example.
The third paper is very innovative as relatively few studies have undertaken such a comprehensive bibliometric research relating to housing prices. This study analysed 4,125 housing prices research papers sourced from the core collection database of Web of Science. The methodology used varying evaluation indicators including statistical and mathematical methods to study the nature and direction of housing price research. Data relating to variables such as countries, institutions, authors and keywords were classified and visually displayed through VOSviewer. The results confirmed that prior to 1990 there were relatively few studies published relating to housing prices. However papers published since 2006 accounted for 90% of the total number of articles published. More specifically, China published 1,395 papers (34%) with the USA publishing 1,356 (33%) papers. Therefore these two countries published about two-thirds of housing price research globally. The results indicated most housing price research utilised quantitative models with econometrics keywords like model, dynamics, regression and quantile regression, hedonic prices, cointegration dominating the bibliometrics results. Note there was an observed lack of qualitative research. The main categories of housing prices research articles included economics (42%), urban (27%) and environmental (19%) where these three types of articles accounted for 88% of all housing price papers.
The fourth paper from Saudi Arabia investigates responses to the changes in the real estate market by analysing cause-effect relationships between the mortgage, residential investment and also employment in the real estate market. The methodology used the the Dickey-Fuller test to estimate the stationarity of the variables. VAR Regression, Granger causality test and impulse response were also undertaken to identify the interactions between the variables with the data relating to the period between 1970 and 2019. The results confirmed a positive relationship between the mortgage level and GDP in the real estate market. The same results were produced for employment and investment with both also having a positive relationship. The government’s monitoring of changes in macroeconomic factors is critical to ensuring the continuity of balance in the real estate market by examining factors affecting both the short and long term time frames, as well as the extent to which these effects can be explained.
All prospective authors are welcome to contact the editor prior to submission to ensure their paper is in an acceptable format for publication. This includes ensuring the submitted paper conforms to the author guidelines for the journal which can reduce the time the paper spends in the double blind review process. Please contact the editor directly if I can be of assistance prior to submission and/or discuss the procedure for admission into the review process. If you are interested in submitting a research paper or reviewing potential publications, please contact the editor direct at ijhma@ijhma.com.
