The Relationship Between Spatial Development and Housing Submarkets in Medium-Sized Cities: The Case of Siirt

The housing market differs from other goods markets due to characteristics such as the heterogeneous nature of housing, its non-substitutability, and its permanence; it consists of sub-markets that differ in terms of price, forms of use, and local and regional dynamics. Related. Whilst the relationship between the housing market and macroeconomic indicators has long been a focus of academic interest, such studies have predominantly concentrated on large metropolitan areas; medium-sized towns have been relatively neglected. Building on this, the study aims to link neighborhood-level price and rent differentiation with spatial development trends in the central district of Siirt—a medium-sized city in Turkey’s South-Eastern Anatolia Region—using data on the sale and rental of residential properties for the period 2023–2026. In the relevant literature on the definition of housing sub-markets, there are divergent views between neoclassical equilibrium, disequilibrium, and behavioral/cultural approaches; this study presents findings regarding the differentiation of the sale and rental housing sub-markets in the central district of Siirt, evaluated through descriptive statistics. In the study, descriptive statistics were applied to 450 housing listings (315 for sale, 135 to rent) compiled from the Sahibinden.com platform during the February–March 2023 period; the findings were cross-validated using time series data from the Endeksa database covering the period 2021–2026, and neighborhood-level price/rent differentiation was linked to the city’s spatial development dynamics. The findings reveal that the housing market in Siirt is not spatially homogeneous: whilst the high sales price-to-low rental yield ratio in the Veysel Karani neighbourhood indicates that the housing market is shaped more by investment value than by use value, neighbourhoods such as Kooperatif and Bahçelievler are positioned as mature sub-markets where use value predominates. This differentiation demonstrates that, in Siirt—a medium-sized city—the direction of urban growth, shaped by transport infrastructure and public investment, has led to the emergence of distinct sub-market characteristics for properties for sale and to let between established neighborhoods and new development areas. From this point, in spatial planning decisions, the evaluation of transportation investments and public service distribution together with for-sale and rental housing market dynamics carries importance for balanced urban development.