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Market Sensitivities and Growth Differentials Across Australian Housing Markets

Willem P Sijp

arXiv 30 Nov 2025 · Econometrics

arXiv:2512.01139 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Australian house prices have risen strongly since the mid-1990s, but growth has been highly uneven across regions. Raw growth figures obscure whether these differences reflect persistent structural trends or cyclical fluctuations. We address this by estimating a three-factor model in levels for regional repeat-sales log price indexes over 1995-2024. The model decomposes each regional index into a national Market factor, two stationary spreads (Mining and Lifestyle) that capture mean-reverting geographic cycles, and a city-specific residual. The Mining spread, proxied by a Perth-Sydney index differential, reflects resource-driven oscillations in relative performance; the Lifestyle spread captures amenity-driven coastal and regional cycles. The Market loading isolates each region's fundamental sensitivity, beta, to national growth, so that a city's growth under an assumed national change is calculated from its beta once mean-reverting spreads are netted out. Comparing realised paths to these factor-implied trajectories indicates when a city is historically elevated or depressed, and attributes the gap to Mining or Lifestyle spreads. Expanding-window ARIMAX estimation reveals that Market betas are stable across major shocks (the mining boom, the Global Financial Crisis, and COVID-19), while Mining and Lifestyle behave as stationary spreads that widen forecast funnels without overturning the cross-sectional ranking implied by beta. Melbourne amplifies national growth, Sydney tracks the national trend closely, and regional areas dampen it. The framework thus provides a simple, factor-based tool for interpreting regional growth differentials and their persistence.

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43
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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Otto, Glenn (2007) The Growth of House Prices in Australian Capital Cities: What Do Economic Fundamentals Explain?1.00053100%
2Sijp, Willem P. and Panagiotelis, Anastasios and Francke, Marc K (2025) Data-sparse price indexes by spatio-temporal regularization and PCA: An application to the Australian housing market self0.96510490%
3(2019) Hot Property: The Housing Market in Major Cities0.73732100%
4Yanotti, Maria and Kangogo, Moses and Wright, Danika and Sarkar, Som… (2023) House Price Dynamics and Internal Migration Across Australia0.73732100%
5Downes, Peter and Hanslow, Kevin and Tulip, Peter (2014) The Effect of the Mining Boom on the Australian Economy0.64422100%
6Kohler, Marion and van der Merwe, Michelle (2015) Long-run Trends in Housing Price Growth0.64422100%
7Sijp, Willem P. and Marc K. Francke (2025) A Hedonic Regularized Random Effects House Price Model Based on Graph Encodings of Neighborhood Structures self0.5112250%
8Abelson, Peter (1994) HOUSE PRICES, COSTS AND POLICIES: AN OVERVIEW0.51121100%
9Case, Karl E. and Cotter, John and Gabriel, Stuart A (2010) Housing Risk and Return: Evidence from a Housing Asset-Pricing Model0.51121100%
10Himmelberg, Charles and Mayer, Christopher and Sinai, Todd (2005) Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals, and Misperceptions0.51121100%

Showing the top 10 of 43 scored citations.