Liquidity, Seasonality, and Distance to Universities: The case of UK rental markets

This paper explores how liquidity in 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 renting 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 2015-17 period. Our results suggest that the probability of renting 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 when the distance between marketed houses and university campuses is taken into account.