THE DURATION OF RENTAL HOUSING VACANCIES

This is an investigation into the probability distribution function for the duration of rental unit vacancies. Besides having drawn some past interest in its own right, the duration of vacancy is related to other durations in real estate and urban economics. The basic model estimated here is that of a gamma mixture, adjusted for length-, truncation- and survivorship-bias, of exponential distributions with hazard rate linear in dwelling characteristics. Among the results are these: duration is directly related to dwelling age, atypicality, the degree to which the neighborhood is ''run down,'' and the number of rental units in the building. Thus, we offer new results and a better handling of unobservables. (C) 1994 Academic Press, Inc.