Evaluation of the Real Estate Dynamics in the Italian University Rental Market

With reference to the student housing market segment in five Italian cities, the present research aims to (i) verify the potential influence of a university center on rental prices, and (ii) analyze the intrinsic factors that mostly affect the formation of rental fees. In particular, in the paper a two-step methodological approach for the achievement of the two goals is proposed. Starting from the collection of a set of rented residential units in the selected cities, in the first step the detection of intrinsic and extrinsic factors taken into account by owners and potential tenants is carried out. The implementation of an econometric technique—called Evolutionary Polynomial Regression—allows to identify the most influential variables and to quantify each contribution on rental prices. In the second step, for cities where the impact of the university's presence has been confirmed by the outputs of the first step, from the initial dataset, new clusters of rented residential properties located in the range of 2 km from the main poles are defined. By excluding the extrinsic factors from the initially considered set as their negligible influence due to the limited distance of the properties, a new econometric model is determined. Therefore, the most influencing factors on local rental dynamics are analyzed and their weight is calculated.