Bringing new ideas to housing research

Hedonic modelling is an empirical analysis technique that is widely used to review the housing market and unpack the main determinants of price. A correct determination of housing price drivers allows a weighted prediction of the value of each dwelling for sale or rent. This paper reviews the fundamental determinants of housing prices that have been published in the literature to see which ones have a better predictive fit for the case of the housing market in the city of Santiago, Chile. From a record of 456,000 property transactions, a dataset composed of 11 explanatory variables is elaborated. Through a semi-logarithmic regression, 4 variables that contribute to explaining the formation of housing prices in Santiago, Chile, are identified. The results indicate that the socioeconomic characterisation of urban areas where housing is traded, the price of copper on the London Metal Exchange, the mortgage interest rate, the age of residential buildings are the main drivers for the main drivers of prices in Santiago. Given the crisis of access to housing in Chile, the article provides relevant information for decision-makers in housing policy.

This article identifies the spatial correlation between the social determinants of health in the housing area (housing prices, overcrowding, poor-quality building materials, and household socioeconomic vulnerability) and the spread of COVID-19 in Santiago de Chile. The research used data from the 2017 Census conducted by the National Institute of Statistics of Chile and data on confirmed cases of COVID-19 (PCR) by communes provided by/obtained from Chile’s Ministry of Health. The article provides a two-fold examination/analysis of the spatial correlation using the Pearson measure to observe how the virus spread from areas with high-quality housing in the early stage of the contagion to then become concentrated in areas with low-quality of housing. The second examination/analysis is a multiple linear regression to identify the housing factors that inform virus propagation. The test results show that of the four social determinants of health relating to housing assessed here, housing prices is the variable that best predicts how the social determinants of health based on housing explain the progress of the pandemic for the Santiago case, following the collinearity factors according to the data used in this study. The conclusions suggest that public policy should treat housing quality as a factor in public health and health risks that needs to be addressed with a transdisciplinary approach to urban planning in Chile.