Residential Property Behavior Forecasting in the Metropolitan City of Milan: Socio-Economic Characteristics as Drivers of Residential Market Value Trends

The phenomenon of urbanization of cities has been the subject of numerous studies and evaluation protocols proposing to analyze the degree of economic and social sustainability of development projects. Through careful research and synthesis of the theoretical framework regarding residential properties’ performance measurement and forecasting, this paper goes deeper into the proposition of property development as an asset class that represents the biggest share of the Italian property market and yet is avoided by the big portfolios. The analysis model was applied to the city of Milan and its Metropolitan Area. The method is based on the development of correlation indices to evaluate different behaviors, through time and a Geographic Information System (GIS) based on the Hedonic Price Method (HPM). Results from a hedonic model estimated for several recent years suggest that, depending on the particular view, the relation between the rent/price performance and the different external and intrinsic variables can represent a useful parameter for evaluating the feasibility of different real estate investments.