Exploring the spatial segmentation of housing markets from online listings

David Abella1, Johann H. Martínez2, Mattia Mazzoli3, Thibault Le Corre4, Julien Migozzi5, Eduard Alonso-Paulí6, Rafel Crespí-Cladera6, Thomas Louail7,8 and José J. Ramasco1
1Instituto de Física Interdisciplinar y Sistemas Complejos IFISC (CSIC-UIB), Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
2Instituto de Matemática Interdisciplinar, Departamento de Análisis Matemático y Matemáticas Aplicadas, and GISC, Universidad Complutense, 28040 Madrid, Spain.
3ISI Foundation, via Chisola 5, 10126 Turin, Italy.
4Département de G'eographie, Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada.
5School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
6Departament d'Economia de l'Empresa, Universitat de les Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
7UMR 8504 Géographie-cités (CNRS - EHESS - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, Université Paris Cité), Campus Condorcet, 93322 Aubervilliers, France. 8UMR 5194 PACTE (CNRS - Sciences Po Grenoble - Université Grenoble Alpes), 38000 Grenoble, France.

(July 2024)

The real estate market shows an inherent connection to space. Real estate agencies unevenly operate and specialize across space, price and type of properties, thereby segmenting the market into submarkets. We introduce here a methodology based on multipartite networks to detect the spatial segmentation emerging from data on housing online listings. Considering the spatial information of the listings, we build a bipartite network that connects agencies and spatial units. This bipartite network is projected into a network of spatial units, whose connections account for similarities in the agency ecosystem. We then apply clustering methods to this network to segment markets into spatially-coherent regions, which are found to be robust across different clustering detection algorithms, discretization of space and spatial scales, and across countries with case studies in France and Spain. This methodology addresses the long-standing issue of housing market segmentation, relevant in disciplines such as urban studies and spatial economics, and with implications for policymaking.

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