Real estate market under catastrophic change

Abstract

Within the last decade, real estate prices in Poland have changed significantly. We believe that these prices inevitably reflect the dynamics of the real estate market, and therefore they can be used to track its evolution path. To study whether and how the prices (regarded as a state variable) change over time depending on such control variables as gross domestic product and central bank interest rates, the theory of discontinuous change (also known as the catastrophe theory) was used. Catastrophic model assumes that small price fluctuations are associated with stable, long-term development of the market, whereas rapid changes are always due to short-term instabilities. In such a picture, the system evolution path draws a smooth curve within the stability area passing continuously between neighboring equilibrium states, and it rarely enters into the instability area to jump over the potential barrier to another equilibrium state.