SPATIAL HETEROGENEITY IN HOUSING MARKET: ANKARA METROPOLITAN AREA

Abstract

Advanced statistical models have been widely used in real estate valuations for various purposes over the last fifty years, and hedonic approaches with their simple and easy interpretable features are still the most popular among these models. However, spatial heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation are the two major features of the housing markets, and traditional regression cannot reflect these locational effects into the model sufficiently. This study employs a Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) model to explore the spatial heterogeneity in the metropolitan area housing market in the city of Ankara. By applying a Gaussian kernel weighting function with adaptive bandwidth based on cross-validation approach on a house listing dataset, it is found that the GWR fit the data better than the traditional ordinary least squares regression which mostly ignore the spatial effects, and there is spatial heterogeneity in the housing market. Explanatory power of the GWR model and parameter estimations are non-stationary over the geographical area. The variations in the coefficients of the variables are depicted on the map and is supported with the spatial correlations between the housing prices and attributes as well.