House Price Dispersion in Taipei Residential Communities

Due to housing stock heterogeneity, most academic discussions on price dispersion in the housing market have traditionally focused on the search behavior of consumers and neglected the housing and neighborhood characteristics that are related to price dispersion. This study applies a rich empirical data set from Taipei to explore the neighborhood characteristics that are associated with a higher degree of dispersion in housing price and associated likelihood of such. We track the housing transactions at the residential community level, and group the communities based on the coefficient of variation of the transaction prices in each community after controlling for community and housing characteristics. We apply a multinomial logistic regression to examine which neighborhood characteristics are more likely to be associated with higher price dispersion. We find that communities with higher price levels and built by government agencies are less likely to have high price dispersion, while those that are older, priced lower or have a minimum floor area of 50 pings are more likely to have higher price dispersion.