A Survey of Factors Affecting Fluctuations of Housing Prices in Kermanshah

Rapid increase in housing price has been a national difficulty for the people and public officials in recent years in Iran. Therefore, the study of factors affecting increased housing prices is of great importance. In this paper, the effects of some key variables, including land price, construction cost, the volume of bank loans to housing sector, exchange rate, stock price index, the number of residential buildings and household income on the price of housing have been studied in Kermanshah. For analyzing the effects of above-mentioned variables on price of houses, an auto regressive distributed lag model has been estimated using quarterly data over the period 1991-2009. Additionally, the error correction model was estimated in order to evaluate the adjustment speed of dynamic model to the long-run one. The estimation results indicate that the macroeconomic variables are of high power in explaining the behavior of house price and its fluctuations.