The Portuguese housing market underwent major transformations between 2010 and 2020. Until then, a delicate but resentful stability had long existed, with distorted rent schemes and low annual price increases proportional to the national economy and the income of the Portuguese population. After the financial crisis, several internal and external variables converged to dramatically change this scenario. In recent years, a growing number of researchers have centred their attention on the difficulties that the Portuguese urban middle-class populations are facing in trying to find homes. This paper analyses these challenges and their impact quantitatively, focusing on the affordability of housing for purchase or rent and considering synthetic indicators for average household incomes in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area between the beginning of 2016 and the end of 2019. The results show that the cost of buying or renting a house in the main Portuguese urban system has become much more detached from local incomes. The article concludes with reflections on the structural reasons for the enduring inequalities in the housing markets and the difficulties recognising territorial cohesion and spatial justice as important elements shaping urban and housing policies in Portugal.
Firms operating in the property sector use information asymmetry and the local monopoly to differentiate prices of housing units. Selling similar housing to purchasers at various prices allows them to maximize profits. The aim of this article is to analyze empirically the behavior of developers, that shape the market situation. It is necessary to depart from the classical analysis of enterprises that operate in a free and competitive market and produce typical, homogeneous goods. We analyze firms that produce heterogeneous goods and make individual trans-actions with each client. We use the hedonic regression to compare the theoretical and empirical prices per sq. m. of dwelling in the primary market in Warsaw and find significant dispersions. The price discrimination strategy, can be one of the explanations of the observed high, upward elasticity of prices.
The article presents a review of the research activities of the Socio-Economics of Housing research team. The Socio-economics of Housing team is one of the research teams at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The main research activities of the team include sociological research concerning attitudes towards housing in the Czech Republic, international comparisons of housing policies and social housing systems, and econometric simulations of policy reforms, like rent deregulation, the introduction of housing allowance and social housing, housing finance, housing market efficiency, and house price indices.
The level of satisfaction that households have with their housing is important for people to function properly, as it largely determines their life satisfaction. Housing satisfaction is a multidimensional concept that can be defined, measured, and analysed in various ways. The aim of the article is to identify the housing satisfaction of Polish households in terms of living space, housing standard, and housing expenses, and to identify the main determinants of housing satisfaction. Factors that have a major impact on housing satisfaction are classified based on a literature review. The sources of Poles’ housing satisfaction are identified using ordered logistic regression. This article is one of the first attempts to analyse housing satisfaction in a post-socialist Central and Eastern European economy.
In this paper we present the first insight about the impact of the COVID epidemic on the pri-mary housing market in Poland, with a focus on Warsaw which is the largest market. We ex-plain the structural features that allowed the market to return to pre-shock levels after the pandemic shock. Contrary, after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis the negative consequences lasted for several years. This time a sharp monetary policy and fiscal intervention was carried out. Moreover, the developer sector is much more mature, has expanded its production capaci-ties. We show empirically that the monopolistic competition of developers allowed them to restrict excessive demand that was observed before the COVID broke out. In this way they were able to increase prices despite the economic problems. Another important structural change was the increased housing demand, mainly for investment housing, which was fi-nanced predominantly with cash and contributed to the development of the rental market. We approximate the investment demand, which was generated by private households that pur-chased flats for rental, with the help of a simple demand and supply model.