Evaluation of Urban Areas and a New Real Estate Database

The human perception of the quality of life in the most various city areas has always influenced the urban geography and development. Nowadays, the questions are how to evaluate the real estate values more appropriate for delineating the urban geography in economic terms. The economic–estimative literature, both theoretical-methodological and empirical, deepens the relationship between the values, i.e. the market values, and the qualitative characteristics of the properties. Part of the qualitative characteristics are linked to the position that the building occupies in the urban system and the presence of these characteristics is reflected in the appreciation/depreciation of the land. In this sense, one of the main issues is the unavailability of complete datasets that can serve as base for the estimation purposes. The official statistics are quite limited in this sense because they are mainly focused on quantitative variables and, therefore, an integration with the administrative information would be useful for the most various purposes the analyses can have, though the numerous problematics well known in literature need to be solved. In this paper, we illustrate new tools of analysis and their various possible applications useful for both public stakeholders and companies that deal with the real estate sector and currently base their decision-making process urban economics on biased assessments. In our double statistical-economic approach of analysis, we first built a unique administrative dataset starting from 4 independent administrative databases, normally managed by independent PA offices, and aligned the administrative information with the official statistics of the Italian National Statistics Institute (ItNSI, hereafter). Finally, we present an attainable application of the new data through the definition of an economic indicator that quantifies the discrepancy between the market value and the value normally used to define the council taxes, and the implementation of a new original hedonic model to the territory under investigation. We circumscribed the analysis to the city of Bari because part of a national project, but the method and the analysis can be perfectly replicated for any dimensional territorial area.