Changing residential preferences in the digital age: Evidence on teleworking and online shopping from the Netherlands

Teleworking and online shopping, as two ICT-enabled behaviours, are reshaping everyday routines and raising questions about how digital practices enter long-term housing trade-offs. This matters for urban planning because changing preferences may alter spatial demand and land-use and transport needs. This study investigates how teleworking and online shopping are associated with residential location choices in the Netherlands and how these relationships vary across demographic groups and life stages. A stated choice experiment was designed to capture forward-looking housing decisions under varying levels of teleworking, online shopping, and anticipated life events. Data were collected from 1064 Dutch participants and analysed using tenure-specific discrete choice models: a covariate-dependent Generalized Mixed Logit model for homeowners and a mixed multinomial logit model for renters. The results show that teleworking eases homeowners' penalty for 20 km commutes, but not for 35 km, while analogous patterns among renters are more limited. Online grocery shopping is associated with supermarket-distance preferences, although this relationship should be interpreted cautiously because it may partly reflect income-related and locational differences. Higher online non-grocery shopping remains associated with stronger preferences for very close retail access, especially among homeowners. Anticipated life events, such as expecting a child, also reshape utility. Scale parameters indicate substantial individual variation in choice consistency. Overall, both ICT-enabled behaviours are associated with housing trade-offs, with stronger and more direct evidence for teleworking. These results have implications for housing policy, accessibility planning, and land-use and transport modelling in increasingly digital urban contexts.