Immigration and regional housing markets: Prices, rents, price-to-rent ratios and disequilibrium

Abstract

The study examines the relationship between immigration and regional housing markets using wavelet coherence analysis in conjunction with Granger causality tests. We find that while there are some regional differences in the relationships, the impact of immigration on house rents is consistently more pronounced than the impact on house prices and, in the short to medium term, an increase in immigration leads to a decrease in price-to-rent ratios. The study uses data sets for different regional housing markets in New Zealand, a country with one of the highest immigration-to-population ratios in the world during the sample period of 1996–2017.