Area-to-point Kriging in spatial hedonic pricing models

This paper proposes a geostatistical hedonic price model in which the effects of location on house values are explicitly modeled. The proposed geostatistical approach, namely area-to-point Kriging with External Drift (A2PKED), can take into account spatial dependence and spatial heteroskedasticity, if they exist. Furthermore, this approach has significant implications in situations where exhaustive area-averaged housing price data are available in addition to a subset of individual housing price data. In the case study, we demonstrate that A2PKED substantially improves the quality of predictions using apartment sale transaction records that occurred in Seoul, South Korea, during 2003. The improvement is illustrated via a comparative analysis, where predicted values obtained from different models, including two traditional regression-based hedonic models and a point-support geostatistical model, are compared to those obtained from the A2PKED model.