Hi,
I have currently working on a small project on property markets
I finalised my idea with my supervisor a while ago and now he's on holidays so I don't know where to turn to for some advice on my topic

So my essay is about the effect of the existence of university on house prices (uk)
My method of research is: compare two towns of similar areas, population, near each other ( preferably in the same county) in which one of them is with a university, the other one is without to see how prices change as a result of the number of students.

Surely, since there are more people in one town, the house prices are higher.
I want to include some variables in the regression ( change in house prices on ratio of students/population) which I can easily find the data for and I haven't got my head around: I have thought of employment, distance to work, regulation.

I found no previous paper on this kind of topic and hope if any of you can give some suggestions
Kind regards,
IB

======= Date Modified 27 Mar 2010 22:20:46 =======
This could also work in the opposite way if you're thinking about students. This is because if the city has a university and there are lots of landlords wanting to rent their flats/room out then most likely there will be competition between them, and the one who can deliver the cheapest value for money will be inundated with requests for rooms. Therefore, the prices might go down as a result.

Thanks for your reply, Dr Moobs (:D )

The main proposal of my essay is: house prices will be higher in the town with a university, ceteris paribus and I'm trying to quantify the impact on house prices. I'm going to work with average data

Your advice will definitely help in criticizing my hypothesis. Do you have any suggestion how to handle the regression so the results can be meaningful ?

Anyone has some advice, please drop by, I really appreciate your help :)

bump.

Distance to London would definitely be a factor on house prices, so you may want to control for that.
I wouldn't say it was population per se that affected house prices - a house in a village with 100 houses in can be really expensive! So you may want to control for something like average wage in that city or something - so measuring the affluence of the area.
Would you also need to control for types of houses e.g. one city might have lots of 5 bedroom huge family homes and the other might have a lot of little 2 up 2 downs, which would affect the average houseprice.

Thanks for your input, Sneaks.

i'm considering Greater London boroughs that are next to each other so the distance to London is almost the same and so is land regulation so hopefully this is going to work out

I'll definitely take into account average earnings, types of houses.

I'm a bit concerned about the main explanatory variable: ratio of students/population: if one town doesnt have a university so almost no HE students ?, how can I put this into the regression?