Open AccessThe private rental housing market before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A submarket analysis in Cracow, Poland
Author(s) -
Mateusz Tomal,
Marco Helbich
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
environment and planning. b, urban analytics and city science/environment and planning. b, urban analytics and city science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.889
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 2399-8091
pISSN - 2399-8083
DOI - 10.1177/23998083211062907
Subject(s) - economic rent , renting , rental housing , pandemic , covid-19 , demographic economics , economics , outbreak , business , geography , agricultural economics , market economy , medicine , disease , pathology , virology , political science , infectious disease (medical specialty) , law , biology
How the COVID-19 pandemic has altered the segmentation of residential rental markets is largely unknown. We therefore assessed rental housing submarkets before and during the pandemic in Cracow, Poland. We used geographically and temporally weighted regression to investigate the marginal prices of housing attributes over space-time. The marginal prices were further reduced to a few principal components per time period and spatially clustered to identify housing submarkets. Finally, we applied the adjusted Rand index to evaluate the spatiotemporal stability of the housing submarkets. The results revealed that the pandemic outbreak significantly lowered rents and modified the relevance of some housing characteristics for rental prices. Proximity to the university was no longer among the residential amenities during the pandemic. Similarly, the virus outbreak diminished the effect of a housing unit's proximity to the city center. The market partitioning showed that the number of Cracow's residential rental submarkets increased significantly as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, as it enhanced the spatial variation in the marginal prices of covariates. Our findings suggest that the emergence of the coronavirus reshaped the residential rental market in three ways: Rents were decreased, the underlying rental price-determining factors changed, and the spatiotemporal submarket structure was altered.