Rental Market Liquidity, Seasonality, and Distance to Universities

Abstract This paper explores how liquidity in the UK rental markets reacts to variations in demand across time and space. We employ a survival analysis approach with a non-parametric hazard rate to investigate whether the probability of a property to exit the market changes across calendar months. Our unique dataset comes from Zoopla.com and contains 300,198 rental listings in 13 major UK university cities over the 2015–2017 period. Our results suggest that the probability of exit is lower during the winter season compared to summer. This could be explained by students’ higher housing demand at the start of the academic term. The results become more pronounced (i.e. the seasonal difference is higher) when the distance between marketed property and university campuses is taken into account.