| The role of intra-regional relocation in the real estate economic literature has been very limited due to the inaccessibility of accurate measures. This research serves as the first application, to the best of my knowledge, of a direct measure of the intent to relocate within a metropolitan statistical area in the proceeding 18 months. The traditional "American" approach and "European" approach relocation variables were tested to determine their explanatory power as to the variation in the intra-regional relocation rate. The results indicate that the traditional independent variables did in fact explain better than seventy-three percent of the variation in the intra-regional relocation rate.;The new measure of intra-regional relocation was then applied to the award winning real estate finance and economics paper by Gordon et al. (1996). Thirteen MSA's were studied utilizing employment growth, unemployment, unexpected unemployment, treasury rate, type of industry, intra-regional relocation, gross rent, and the restrictiveness of regional development. The results indicate that the addition of the intra-regional relocation variable to the model developed by Gordon et al. vastly increased the explanatory power of the variation in vacancy rates during the declining phase of the real estate cycle. |
