(with Xinyue Ye)

This paper focuses on modeling buy-sellers in urban housing markets. Buy-sellers refer to intra-urban residential movers whose buying and selling decisions are interdependent: a purchase depends on a successful sale due to budget or policy constraints; while a sale relies on a successful bid to avoid renting for transition. This paper discusses buy-sellers’ role from a network perspective and develops a new agent-based model (ABM) to simulate the impact of buy-sellers on aggregate market outcomes. Our simulation results show that more buy-sellers would lead to a smaller total number of trades (TNT) and a longer average time-on-market (ATOM). In addition, the relationships of the buy-seller with TNT and ATOM appear to be variable with the level of buy-seller share and the maximum waiting time of a pending contract. We argue that buy-sellers provide a new perspective to understand housing market mechanisms and related policies. Our buy-seller ABM is also useful for empirical applications to regions where resale housing markets are dominant.