UNDERSTANDING THE DRIVING FORCES OF SEASONALITY IN THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL DISTRIBUTION OF HOUSING MARKET PRICES AND TRANSACTION VOLUMES

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to investigate the existence of seasonality in the United States (US) housing market and the impact it has on three measures of liquidity: (a) Days on Market, (b) Sales Count, (c) Price Reduction. Days on market refer to how long a house is listed and sold. Sales count is the number of transactions in a period. Price reduction is the price adjustments to its asking price before a house is transacted. Prior to this dissertation, there has been limited literature which studied the US housing sale market with complete information. For the first time, such valuable information on liquidity is obtained from Zillow, a marketplace in the US, and other external sources to carry out this research. This study will use Ordinary Least Square (OLS) regression model to find statistical significance between several seasonality factors: (a) hot/cold waves of market liquidity, (b) the patterns of school year scheduling, (c) the spatial patterns of weather, (d) superstition against the measures of liquidity.