Real Estate and Urban Economics

Real estate accounts for 55% of household capital and 75% of household debt; real estate wealth represents around 400 trillion dollars. These assets are spatially localized. ¿ of Canadians live in urban areas, and in the United States only 3% of land is developed. This importance of space requires specific methods for calculating asset prices, population movements, investment flows, the spatial distribution of services and wages, and the spatial diversification of asset portfolios. The course presents the dynamics of market equilibrium in space using recent techniques, models and granular data. Geolocalized data and spatial projection methods are presented. Real estate asset valuation notions (hedonic pricing, automatic valuation models, comparable assets, capitalization methods) used by companies such as JLR and Zillow are presented. Recent quantitative spatial models are presented, and students will be able to use them to simulate the dynamics of a city in response to these shocks.