Effect of property ownership structure on neighborhoods residential turnover: new insights from land registry microdata analysis

Keywords: Housing, Ownership, Landlords, Residential turnover, Spatial Analysis, France
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 29

Abstract

Over the last decades, neighborhoods change has mainly been studied in light of residents’ mobility and immobility. These movements participate to socio-spatial recomposition at the neighborhood scale and result for example in gentrification processes (e.g. Le Goix and al.). Several studies have shown the importance of the tenure status in limiting or fostering residential mobility. Private tenants being more mobile on the market than social housing tenants and owner-occupiers (e.g. Cho, Whitehead, 2013).
In this study, we move away from these approaches and look at another driver of residential neighborhood change. We look at the role of ownership structures on housing turnover, which importance has previously been demonstrated for specific contexts (Dieleman, 2000; Engels, 1999). The notion of ‘ownership structure’ refers here to the type of ownership right, the number of persons sharing rights, the type of landlord according to its portfolio size, and also its behavior regarding assets management. In this study, we investigate novel longitudinal micro-geographic dataset on property ownership and transactions (from French property tax services). We use it to analyze the interactions between the ownership structure of the housing stock and the turnover in the local housing markets. We hypothesize that the complexity of the ownership structure makes housing units difficult to sell and, at the upper level, limits the neighborhood change. We analyze this phenomenon in three French functional urban areas. This study provides new insights on the spatial patterns of change and on the role of the property ownership structure in these transformations.