Geographic Regularities in Residential Search Behavior

Households exhibit strong spatial regularities in their residential search behavior; moreover these regularities arise from two distinct but interrelated sources: the spatial variation in the number of vacancies meeting particular housing needs and spatial biases in the household's search strategies. Three models of the search process are evaluated against observed search behavior for a sample of prospective home buyers in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles; in each instance, analysis of observed search behavior supports the hypothesized relationship between the search pattern and the locational variables influencing it. A constrained choice set model calls attention to the relationship between the spatial variation in the number of vacancies in the household's possibility set and the pattern of vacancies visited by the household. The area-based search model focuses on the locational persistence in the household's search behavior. The key to the anchor points model is that locational preference declines with increasing distance from critical anchor points in the household's activity space. The locations of the prior residence and the workplace (or workplaces for dual worker households) are shown to have a significant influence on the resulting pattern of vacancies seen by the household.