This is a spatial agent-based model of the UK housing market written by the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. It is based on a previous non-spatial model developed by INET in collaboration with the Bank of England. A detailed description of this initial non-spatial model can be found as a Staff Working Paper of the Bank of England .
The spatial model, while keeping the same agents as in the non-spatial version (owner-occupiers, renters, buy-to-let investors, a private bank, a central bank, a construction sector, and a government), incorporates a number of spatial features with their corresponding agent behaviours. Namely, households have to decide where to bid for housing given a certain spatial distribution of prices and commuting costs. These decisions, in turn, feed back into the market mechanism, possibly modifying the spatial distribution of prices.