Prof. Albert Saiz

Professor Saiz's focus is primarily on housing markets, with a particular view on understanding the demographic influences impacting their growth, and has done path-breaking work on the impact of immigrant inflows on housing prices in urban areas. ‘Immigration explains 50 percent of the differences in growth between metropolitan areas in the United States,’ he says. ‘If you want to understand real estate markets or housing markets, construction values, etc., you have to understand immigration and immigration trends.’

Saiz also studies several other key drivers of city growth and demand for housing and real estate assets, including tax rates, education levels and more lifestyle-oriented influences. ‘As recently as 20 years ago,’ he says, ‘we tended to believe that people followed jobs. It is still the case that productive areas are becoming more attractive for housing demand, but it is also true that jobs are following people. And people are moving more for lifestyle and amenities.’ Today, Saiz’s students are more likely to indicate they want to work in a particular city than for a particular company. That means firms that want to attract young professionals have to locate in these more highly desirable areas.

Using big data to understand the dynamics of real estate, Saiz creates and studies intensely detailed information about housing markets and how urban growth impacts real estate markets. One of his particular strengths is the measurement of market features that are difficult to quantify. ‘I have come up with indexes to measure local regulations, zoning regulations, land availability, the quality of land, access to transport, etc.,’ he says, ‘so that at this point we have huge data sets for most census blocks in the United States.’ Using that data, he and his team are able to forecast variables critical for real estate developers, investors, portfolio investors and investors in mortgage markets.