The Impact of Selected Macroeconomic Variables on House Prices in Croatia

Abstract

Recognizing the macroeconomic determinants that have a statistically significant influence on the formation of house prices is in the interest of the general public due to its informative effect on various interest groups involved in housing construction. Thus, real estate buyers, investors, as well as local government and self-government units should be interested in this information because monitoring of standard macroeconomic variables can provide conclusions about the possible development of residential property prices. Previously conducted research can be classified into four distinctive categories depending on what they take as determining variables: microelements specific to individual micro location, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, standard macroeconomic variables, or tourism development. The aim of this study is to analyze the influence of selected macroeconomic variables on residential property prices in Croatia. This study employs Autometrics, i.e. an automatic computer implementation of general-to-specific VAR (vector autoregressive) modelling framework and quarterly data on real GDP, domestic credit, consumer prices, interest rate, tourist arrivals and house prices in the period from March 2005 to September 2022. Performed Granger causality tests and impulse response functions analysis indicate that an increase in real GDP, domestic credit and tourist arrivals increases house prices in Croatia while an increase in consumer prices and interest rate reduces them.