Housing Market in Malaga: An Application of the Hedonic Methodology

These difficulties increase due to socioeconomic and cultural factors that make the evaluation of
attributes different according to where the study is performed. However, it is worth mentioning
that the results obtained in recent works by Bengochea (2003), Bilbao (2000), Bowen et al.
(2001), Fletcher et al. (2004), Harding et al. (2003), McMillen (2004) and Tajima (2003) are
similar to those obtained in our work.

Conclusions

The complexity of the housing market and the difficulty in obtaining realistic results
regarding prices have encouraged the development of methodologies different from the
traditional ones. This paper attempts to establish an estimation of both housing prices and the
value of housing attributes according to the market. The results were obtained using hedonic
methodology.

It is worth highlighting the qualitative jump yielded by the use of this methodology in the
analysis of price setting of commodities with objectively measurable and valuable attributes,
such as houses. Although, most of the estimated model is based on decisions that were taken
according to the information available, given that we used real data from transactions actually
carried out, the estimations obtained should be similar to the current expectations of the market.
The intrinsic difficulty in obtaining actual housing prices when data comes from official surveys,
Land Property records, Fiscal Data, etc., rather than from Real State companies is well known.

The results obtained show that the attributes with the greatest influence on housing
prices, measured by standardized coefficients of the estimated hedonic function, are structural
factors such as surface area, number of bathrooms, private parking or limited natural light.
Given that, currently, there seems to be a serious problem of house availability in Spain due to
high housing prices, it seems reasonable to consider that one way to reduce costs is to reduce
certain facilities, such as the number of bathrooms, and eliminate others, such as private
parking, among others. This possibility should be analyzed not only from the perspective of
economic criteria, but also bearing in mind social implications, since access to decent housing
is a social target which has yet to be fulfilled.

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