Modelling Spatial Structures in Local Housing Market Dynamics: A Multilevel Perspective

There has been a long history of research into the development and estimation of hedonic house price models. There is, however, a discrepancy between the empirical and theoretical approaches to this research. A major issue lies in the integration of the conceptual and theoretical models of local housing markets with the context-insensitive nature of the standard hedonic model specification. This paper explores this inconsistency by using multilevel modelling to move towards a more empirically and conceptually appealing specification of the hedonic house price model. It uses price data from Cardiff to investigate how a multilevel approach can explicitly incorporate the spatial structures of housing market dynamics and the ad hoc nature of the valuation process. The paper concludes that successful empirical analysis depends upon a clear theoretical understanding of the processes under investigation.