House prices and rents: micro evidence from a matched dataset in Central London

Using the proprietary dataset of a real estate agency, I analyse tens of thousands of housing sale and rental transactions in Central London during the 2005-2011 period. I run hedonic regressions on both prices and rents and show that price-rent ratios are higher for bigger and more central units. Since this result could be driven by differences in unobserved characteristics between properties for sale and properties for rent, I replicate my analysis using only units that were both sold and rented out within 6 months, and get similar results. I discuss several possible explanations for my findings.