Spatial spillovers of tourism activity on housing prices: The case of Croatia

The tourism effects on housing prices within cities and regions have been analyzed in the literature, but there is a lack of evidence on the spatial effects of these processes. In areas hit by overtourism, house price hikes have the potential of spillovers to adjacent cities and towns as well as across wider space. Our study widens existing knowledge on the tourism-housing relationship by exploring the existence and extent of spatial spillovers from tourism-intensive cities and towns on housing prices of neighboring areas. A Durbin spatial autoregression panel model is applied on a population of cities and towns from Croatia, one of the small tourism-driven European economies during the 2012-2019 period. Different spatial weight matrices are applied to the model to explore the spatial reach of effects. Our findings, robust to the use of different tourism activity proxies, provide support to the existence of spatial spillover effects. The strongest effects of tourism on housing prices within and between cities come through the conversion of housing stock in rental properties rather than through the increase of private accommodation share in total accommodation capacities. Particularly strong effects are found once full spatial correlation is taken into account.