Measuring the Effect of Location on House Prices in Italy

Abstract

The Italian housing market is characterised by both a strong heterogeneity of real estate assets and a reduced number of property sales. These features, indeed, hamper the use of the hedonic price method, namely, the method that is mostly used for assessing the house prices and for estimating the monetary value of housing characteristics. In this paper, therefore, a hedonic model with dummy variables that identify housing submarkets is used to achieve two important results: enabling greater use of multiple regression analysis in the study of the Italian real estate market, and catching, in the simplest possible manner, the effect of location on house price. Indeed, the house's location is, together with the area in square metres, the housing characteristic that most influences the house price.