Defining Housing Market Areas Using Commuting and Migration Algorithms: Catalonia (Spain) as a Case Study

In the literature on housing market areas, different approaches can be found to defining them—for example, using travel-to-work areas and, more recently, making use of migration data. This paper proposes a simple exercise to shed light on which approach performs better. Using regional data for Catalonia, in Spain, housing market areas are computed with both commuting data and migration data. In order to decide which procedure shows superior performance, the uniformity of prices within areas is examined. The main finding is that commuting algorithms present more homogeneous areas in terms of housing prices.