Did the refugee crisis a ect local property prices? The case of temporary housing sites in Gothenburg.

Abstract

We evaluate the property price development in neighborhoods surrounding temporary housing sites during "rumor phase" of construction. Property data from Booli.se and Lantmäteriet between 2014 - 2017 is used together with a simple hedonic pricing approach. We exploit the natural experiment setting of three simultaneous and unpredicted announced housing sites, targeting refugees, in Gothenburg and perform a difference-in-difference estimation to assess the effect. The results indicate that the single-family house market have been unaffected by the announcement while the market for apartments potentially have experienced a lower price development in areas surrounding the sites compared to the rest of Gothenburg. The results are however inconclusive and we highly encourage future research to replicate our study once the sites are up and running to evaluate the final effect as well as to identify the underlying determinants.