Correlates of House Rent in Two Deluxe House Categories; Stand-alone and Semi-Detached Duplexes in Abia State, Nigeria

Abstract

This paper assessed the correlates of house rent in Stand-alone and Semi-detached duplexes in Abia state, Nigeria. Six housing layouts in the two study locations of the state had 57 and 59 housing units respectively. From this number, the Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA) was applied to ascertain the determinants of house rent using house quality, house shortage, location, house agents and income as predictor variables. Results are that the MCA showed high r² values of 0.95 and 0.99 for the stand-alone and semi-detached apartments respectively. This consistency hence suggests that the few available housing units in these two categories will have high rents that are being paid by those at the high income echelon of the population. In this regard, injection of lower house categories into the housing market and public-private partnership among others were recommended.

Keywords: House rent, duplexes, housing, MCA, Abia State.