Editorial

• Date: 02 December 2024
• Pages: 1349-1350
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHMA-11-2024-190
• Published date: 02 December 2024
• Subject Matter: Property management & built environment,Real estate & property,Housing markets
• Author: Koech Cheruiyot

Editorial

As guest editor,I welcome you to the International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis

special edition on Spatial Analysis and Housing Markets. As evident by the trends in social

sciences toward spatial analyses, this special edition focuses on a relevant, but a research

issue that has received little attentionin housing market research. This is despite the fact that

residential real estate is locationspecif‌ic; meaning there is adequate motivation to understand

such problems from relevantspatial scales, such as regions, zones, neighborhoods or specif‌ic

sites. The analyses that go beyondtraditional analyses to incorporate spatial analyses provide

complete perspective to guide decision-making. This is now possible due to the help of

advanced computational technology and availability of geocoded data. I hope that this

volume will be of an interest to real estate researcherson spatial analysis of housing markets

in particular and real estate markets in general. As guest editor, I would like to thank the

authors and refereesfor their contribution to this special issue.

The six papers in this special edition include cutting-edge research and unique data

analysis approachesfrom a diverse range of countries and varying continents. I offer a glance

of what these papers offer to the readers.

At a broader spatial scale, the paper by Akinsomi, Bangura and Yacim investigates the

effect of mining activities on house prices in South Africa’s mining and non-mining towns.

The authors deployed an auto-regressive distributed lag model and found that both changes

in mining activities and inf‌lationary pressure impact the housing price of mining towns

directly and instantaneouslyin the short run. The paper further found that increasinghousing

supply will help cushion house pricesin both mining and non-mining submarkets. However,

the paper found evidence of one-wayspillover in housing prices from mining towns to non-

mining towns and none in return. In the long run, a favorable mortgage lending rate and

adequate housing supplyare benef‌icial.

The paper by Rajaei, Mottaghi, Saharand Bahadori investigates the spatial distribution of

housing prices and the inf‌luencingfactors on the cost of residential units in the metropolis of

Tehran, Iraq. The authors employ ordinary least squares (OLS) regression and

geographically weighted regression (GWR) to model the data. Based on the results, the

GWR performed betterthan the OLS regression in modeling housing prices in thestudy area.

The GWR results show that access to sports f‌ields, distance from gas stations and distance

from water stations emerged withstatistically signif‌icant results. The distance from fault has

an insignif‌icant impact on increasing housing prices at the city level. These results indicate

that the housing prices in Tehran are affected by the access level to urban services and

facilities, supporting the need for the Tehran metro and other stakeholders to focus their

efforts on fosteringsustainable housing.

Salov’s paper explores the dynamics of house prices and sales in spatial and temporal

dimensions across British regions. The price diffusion model, proposed by Holly et al. (2011),

was applied to the UK house price index data set, while a bivariate global vector autoregression

(GVAR) model without a time trend was applied to house prices and transaction volumes

retrieved from the nationwide building society. The price diffusion model, which incorporated

spatial and temporal dimensions, demonstrates the presence of a ripple effect: a shock emanating

from London is dispersed contemporaneously and spatially to other regions, affecting prices in

This paper forms part of a special section “Spatial analysis and housing markets”, guest edited by

Koech Cheruiyot.

International

Journal of

Housing Markets

and Analysis

1349

InternationalJournal of Housing

Marketsand Analysis

Vol.17 No. 6, 2024

pp. 1349-1350

© Emerald Publishing Limited

1753-8270

DOI 10.1108/IJHMA-11-2024-190