Do tenants change? The refugee crisis, pandemics and the price-setting factors of the housing rental market in Poznan, Poland

The COVID-19 pandemic that started in early 2020 and the refugee crisis related to the Russian invasion on Ukraine in February 2022 have been the source of shocks to the housing rental market. It has been particularly visible in Poland, where the market reacted to the changing environment through multiple channels, out of which two are the areas of interest of this paper. First of those is the rent-setting factors channel as it may be hypothesized that in response to those shocks the preferences of market participants have changed. Secondly, the drastic changes of demand and its structure resulted in an unprecedented variation of rent levels. Based on the hedonic model of the market of Poznan (Poland) it has been documented, that the pandemic influenced revealed preferences of market participants towards certain housing characteristics, such as the number of rooms, proximity to green areas and proximity to city center, leaving the price elasticity of presence of balcony unchanged. As for the impact of the refugee crisis on the rent-setting factors, it has been shown that it has affected the tenants’ attitudes towards apartment furnishing, its type of heating and the type of building in which the apartment is located. Moreover, the quality-adjusted hedonic rent indices have been obtained using OLS, quantile regression and Spatial Autoregressive Model (SAR). Their goal has been to quantify the rent change of the market in years 2019-2023 but also to discuss the sensitivity of the rent indices to the rent-setting factors changes. The analysis has been conducted on the unique (in terms of the number of housing characteristics and their completeness) dataset of rental listings. However, in order to prove the validity of the results the comparison of some transactional and listings data has been provided. The early results show that the coefficients of the models built on the possessed dataset of apartment listings go in line with the ones obtained on the transactional data. Thus, running the analysis of the rent-setting factors on the listing data may be considered justified.