Using the proprietary dataset of a real estate agency, I analyse tens of thousands of housing sale and rental transactions in Central London during the 2005-2011 period. I run hedonic regressions on both prices and rents and show that price-rent ratios are higher for bigger and more central units. Since this result could be driven by differences in unobserved characteristics between properties for sale and properties for rent, I replicate my analysis using only units that were both sold and rented out within 6 months, and get similar results. I discuss several possible explanations for my findings.

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6 February 2013     Paper Number SERCDP0127

Download PDF - House Prices and Rents: Micro Evidence from a Matched Dataset in Central London

This SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper is published under the centre's Urban programme, Neighbourhoods programme.

This publication comes under the following theme: Housing