Urban Vitality and Cadastral Undervaluation in a Rapidly Urbanising Andean City: Evidence from Ambato, Ecuador

Official cadastral values in Latin American intermediate cities may fail to keep pace with rapidly changing asking-price patterns, weakening the responsiveness of local property-tax bases. This study introduces the Relative Gap Rate (TBR), defined as the proportional divergence between observed vacant-land asking prices and official cadastral values, and applies it to Ambato, Ecuador. A dataset of 182 georeferenced asking-price observations was interpolated across a common cantonal support of 19,231 hexagonal cells. Predictors comprised a hierarchically weighted Urban Vitality Index (UVI), distance to the structural road network, elevation, and traffic-incident count derived from 1787 records. The TBR surface exhibited very strong positive spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s <!-- MathType@Translator@5@5@MathML2 (no namespace).tdl@MathML 2.0 (no namespace)@ -->