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Better housing-demand accounting does not automatically produce better forecasts. This study separates a coherent migration measure from the evidence needed to show incremental predictive value.
Research status: Preprint. Original research date: 2026-07-31.
Authors: Genliang Zhu, Chu Wang.
Overview
International migration is often discussed as housing demand, but raw population flows can double-count temporary-to-permanent transitions and ignore differences in household formation. This paper combines population components for 41 Canadian metropolitan areas with status- and tenure-specific housing-use rates to estimate migration-associated occupied-dwelling use per 1,000 dwellings.
The study tests whether that measure improves forecasts of Vancouver’s New Housing Price Index using release-delay-safe pseudo-real-time and historical-release evaluations. Some short-horizon models improve point estimates, but the gains are imprecise or do not persist across horizons and benchmarks. The central result is therefore disciplined: accounting coherence and incremental forecast value are separate questions.
Core contributions
Reproducible demand measure
Constructs a comparable migration-associated occupied-dwelling-use flow while reconciling temporary-to-permanent transitions instead of counting them as new external arrivals.
Release-aware evaluation
Uses current-vintage pseudo-real-time tests and a separate reconstruction from exact Statistics Canada historical releases to reduce look-ahead bias.
Multi-horizon comparison
Compares benchmarks, autoregressions, pooled models, forecast combinations, and a neural specification across quarterly and annual horizons.
Transparent negative evidence
Reports where apparent gains are statistically imprecise, fail at longer horizons, or do not clear incremental-information criteria.
Evidence and scope
This SSRN preprint studies measurement and predictive association. It does not identify a causal policy effect or establish prospective forecast superiority. Several exercises are exploratory, historical data can be revised, and results for Vancouver new-house prices should not be generalized to all housing markets or outcomes.
