Forecasting Housing Supply: Empirical Evidence from the Irish Market

Abstract

This paper compares the performance of three alternative models in forecasting housing supply in the Irish Republic. The results highlight key behavioural issues in the dynamics of housing supply that the OLS and VAR models fail to adequately capture due to the inclusion of fundamental variables in their specification. The behaviour of developers in delaying projects means that housing supply can often respond slowly to demand shocks. For this reason the OLS and VAR models substantially over-estimate housing supply during the period 1998-2001. In comparison the simple ARIMA model provides generally accurate forecasts of supply.