Past Price ‘Memory’ in the Housing Market : Testing the Performance of Different Spatio-Temporal Specifications

Recent methodological developments provide a way to incorporate the temporal dimension, when accounting for spatial effects in hedonic pricing. Weight matrices should decompose the spatial effects into two distinct components: i) bidirectional contemporaneous spatial connections; ii) and unidirectional spatio-temporal effects from past transactions. Our iterative estimation approach explicitly analyses the role of time in price determination. The results show that: both spatio-temporal components should be included in model specification; past transaction information stops contributing to price determination after 8 months; limited temporal friction is exhibited within this period. These findings highlight the decidedly non-linear temporal patterns of such information effects