Towards a Hedonic Pricing Method for the Bucharest Private Housing Market

Abstract

This paper aims at exploring the drivers of dwellings’sale prices in Bucharest, Romania, over the period 2014-2018. Several housing structural attributes are covered, such as the number of rooms, useful and constructed surface, type of comfort, floor, the number of bathrooms, balconies and parking, the seniority from construction, as well as from renovation, structure type, height regime, and the duration until completion of the real estate transaction. By estimating a standard hedonic price model via OLS regression for a sample of 765 transactions, we notice that all the selected variables, except the floor level and seniority from construction, positively influence the property prices. However, in case of useful and constructed surface, nonlinear relationships with property prices were acknowledged. Robustness checks in form of quantile regressions reinforce the empirical findings.