Pricing Strategies – In newly developed housing projects

Sammanfattning: Earlier studies examining house pricing have mainly focused on the secondary market and have often overlooked the primary market and newly produced housing units. This paper studies the pricing strategies in the primary housing market, as that segment differs from the secondary market. By using data from one newly produced housing project, we are able to exclude a number of project-specific factors, as they are nearly identical for all observations. This allows us to focus on factors that are directly observable and require very little assessment or evaluation in our estimations of list prices, selling prices and selling times. The empirical results exhibit a close relationship between list- and selling prices, but a few factors differ significantly between the two. Such differences could indicate a misinterpretation of the market by the seller. The time-on-market model shows that a number of factors affect selling times as well. The results indicate a relationship between "mispriced" factors and their impact on the selling times, where "over-priced" factors seem to prolong the time-on-market and "under-priced" factors seem to shorten the time-on-market. By dividing the units into different price ranges, it becomes clear that high-priced housing is more difficult to price and take longer to sell. This relationship is strengthened by a degree-of-overpricing variable, which exhibits a positive sign in the time-on-market model. The effect is the strongest in low-priced units and not significant for higher-priced units. Other factors that affect pricing strategies require a broader discussion. Analogies from similar consumer good markets indicate that pricing strategies are dependent on the types of customers in the target groups as well as the stage in the project life-cycle.