MCMC Bayesian spatial filtering for hedonic models in real estate markets

Abstract

The traditional hedonic model postulates that housing prices depend on their characteristics and their location. However, this model assumes a constant relationship between the dependent and the independent variables. This assumption is unrealistic because empirical studies have shown that the regression coefficients depend on the housing location. For this reason, it is necessary to use models with spatially varying coefficients. The approaches proposed in the literature used to estimate this type of models do not incorporate the uncertainty associated with the estimation and selection of models and/or are computationally expensive. To improve these aspects, this paper proposes spatial filtering techniques to parsimoniously model the spatial dependencies of the hedonic coefficients and an adaptive MCMC Bayesian algorithm to select the most appropriate filters. The method is illustrated through an application to the real estate market of Zaragoza, and a comparison with alternative procedures is conducted. Our results show that our valuation methodology has better goodness of fit and predictive performance properties than alternative methods. Although our proposal assumes normality and homoscedasticity of the model error distribution, the method is easy to implement and not very computationally demanding, which makes this approach attractive and useful from a practical viewpoint.