Multilevel approach to the analysis of housing submarkets

There is a vast literature that seeks to define and identify spatial submarkets in metropolitan housing systems. These tend to use one of three methods to delineate submarkets: a priori geographies, ad hoc subdivision and data-driven approaches to grouping units. Recently, analysts have increasingly used multilevel modelling strategies to analyse spatial segmentation in the housing market. Despite the increasing prevalence of multilevel approaches, there is no existing systematic analysis of which of these three main approaches to submarket definition has the greatest effectiveness when employed in a multilevel modelling framework. This paper addresses the gap in the literature by comparing the utility of these main approaches to submarket definition. It develops and evaluates three separate, distinct multilevel models of submarkets to a data set comprising 2175 transactions in the Istanbul housing market of Turkey, an emergent market context. The results show that multilevel models with a priori submarket dummy variable can predict price more accurately than the models with ad hoc subdivision or data-driven stratified submarkets. Similarly, test results indicate that multilevel models with neighbourhood submarket dummy variables (a priori) perform better than other models. These test results show that granular definition of submarkets tend to perform better in terms of predictive accuracy than less spatially granular models. The paper also suggests that real estate agents’ views of submarket structures might be particularly useful as inputs into micro-modelling processes in contexts where datasets are thin.