Housing property market and tourism accommodation in South Africa: time series analysis

Abstract

This study tested the relationship between tourism accommodation and South African property market for small, medium and large houses. The sample period consists of 101 monthly time series from January 2007 to May 2015. Three different autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models were used to test for the short-run and long-run relationships between the income from tourism accommodation and housing property prices. This study provides empirical evidence supporting the long-run relationships between tourism accommodation and the South African property market for large and medium houses. This implies that the demand for tourism accommodation is affected by changes in housing property prices in the long-run and, in turn, the growth of the tourism industry tends to affect the property prices in the long-run. Analysis of the short-run relationships showed that housing prices have a significant short-run effect on tourism accommodation but the tourism sector does not have a short-run effect on the property market. This study further found that there are no short-run interactions between the tourism accommodation and property market for small houses. This study concluded that the property market is among the key determinants of growing demand for tourism accommodation in South Africa.