Home-seekers in the Housing Market

Abstract

The housing market matching model in this paper considers two types of home-seekers: people who search for a house both in the rental and the homeownership markets, and people who only search in the homeownership market. The house-search process leads to several types of matching and in turn, this implies different prices of equilibrium. Also, the house-search process connects the rental market with the homeownership market. This model is thus able to explain both the relationship between the rental and the selling prices and the price dispersion which exists in the housing market. Furthermore, this theoretical model can be used to study the impact of taxation in the two markets. Precisely, it is straightforward for showing the effects of two different taxes: tax on property sales and tax on rental income.