How Zagdim Does Research
The price of a home was never just bricks plus location. It is a product of urban structure, a signal of capital, an outcome of institutions and a carrier of culture — and it lands, finally, in the life of a real household. What Zagdim studies is the whole picture: how the market really works when people cross borders to live, buy and build.
Seeing that object clearly takes more than one discipline. Over the past two centuries, economists, geographers and sociologists have built tool after tool for understanding property — Zagdim's framework is not invented from scratch; it is assembled from that tradition, for people buying across borders. This page sets out the lenses we use, where our data comes from, and how conclusions are checked.
The Framework: Seven Lenses
Every research question is examined through at least three of them.
Location & the City
Economics has been answering this for two hundred years — von Thünen showed in 1826 that land rent comes from accessibility, and Alonso turned it into the modern city's pricing model in 1964: every use bids for position, and the highest bidder wins. Density, commuting corridors, retail hierarchies, the direction a city is growing — this is the first layer of any project we look at.
Economy & Capital
The rental market and the asset market are two different markets, and they can part ways. DiPasquale and Wheaton captured the whole transmission in a single four-quadrant diagram in 1992: how interest rates become prices, and prices become construction. We use that distinction to test every "boom".
Supply & Cycles
How much a city is building, and how much it absorbs, is the most checkable number in property — and the one narratives most often skip. Land values move in cycles; that is not mysticism. Homer Hoyt proved it in 1933 with a century of Chicago land prices, and the industry still tracks every metro through Mueller's four phases: recovery, expansion, hypersupply, recession. When we ask "why now", we start here.
Demographics & Migration
Population is the deepest current under housing demand — and the most easily abused forecasting tool. The discipline's most famous lesson: in 1989, two Harvard economists used a demographic model to predict that US house prices would fall by nearly half in real terms over twenty years. They didn't. So Zagdim uses demographic data, but never single-factor predictions.
Institutions & Law
North called institutions "the rules of the game"; de Soto showed that property without reliable title is "dead capital". Who may buy, how tenure is structured, what must be disclosed, how tax works, how money moves in and out: for cross-border buyers, this lens decides outcomes more often than price does.
Culture & Behaviour
Psychological bias is written into prices, literally. Behavioural economics supplies the tools: Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory explains why sellers facing a paper loss cling to their asking price; stigma discounts have been quantified; neighbourhood change has rent-gap theory. Industry reports rarely touch this dimension — it is unhelpful to a sales narrative. Zagdim writes it, because it is real.
Life on the Ground
What the people who live, buy and file the paperwork actually experience. Jane Jacobs taught the whole industry one thing in 1961: to judge a street, stand on it. Economics has models for how schools, taxes and services capitalise into prices (Tiebout's "voting with your feet") — but beyond the numbers, we insist on context-rich observation in the field.
One set of yardsticks across all seven lenses
Price decomposition (Rosen's 1974 hedonic method — a view, a school district, a floor level each carry a computable implicit price) and affordability ratios (price-to-income and price-to-rent, the standard yardsticks for comparing housing markets worldwide). Every figure carries its source and grade: primary (official documents, quotes we obtained ourselves), named industry sources, or media reports — and we tell you which.
We only publish a judgement when the lenses converge on it — a discipline research methodology calls triangulation, and the foundation of every piece of Zagdim research.
The Line We Stand On
None of our lenses is homemade — each rests on foundations that have survived a century of testing.
The Framework Keeps Growing
Seven lenses are today's answer, not the final one. What we study is alive: visa regimes change yearly, remote work has redrawn what a commute means, climate is entering valuations, and new asset forms, platforms and buyer generations keep arriving. Every new variable the world grows, the way we look at the world needs one more angle.
So the framework stays open. The day a new dimension matters enough to become the eighth lens, we will add it. This page carries a version date; when the method changes, we will say here what changed, and why.
Where the Data Comes From: Four Channels
Industry network
We work daily with estate agents, developers, lawyers, tax advisers and visa consultants across our markets — putting structured questions to practitioners, recording how things are actually done, quoted and judged on the front line, and cross-checking before anything enters our research. Using a professional network as a research instrument is orthodox industry practice; what matters is doing it systematically. Zagdim's network was built one engagement at a time.
Industry data
First-hand market terms from that network — real quotes, deal conditions, service fees, processing times — alongside official statistics and the original text of laws and court decisions.
Continuous observation
What buyers and residents actually say on social platforms. We run systematic social listening under the discipline of netnography: a recording framework fixed in advance, consistent sampling rules, raw samples retained — all of it reviewable.
Desk research
Regulations read in the original, statistics checked cell by cell, judgments read in full. Every piece ends with its complete source list, and every document we cite is archived — ask us years later where a number came from, and we can produce the original.
Verification & Writing Standards
Primary sources over second-hand reports; named sources over anonymous ones; what we cannot verify, we downgrade in wording and say so. Facts and judgement stay separate: wherever Zagdim is making a call, it is labelled The Zagdim read. When we find an error, we correct it publicly and date the correction.
Who We Are
Zagdim is a research publication focused on overseas property, global living and international business. We believe three things:
Big decisions deserve serious research
Crossing a border to live, buy or build is one of the largest decisions in a lifetime. A serious decision deserves serious research — original documents, verified numbers, feet on the ground.
Making markets transparent
In overseas markets, the information gap is where the risk lives. Zagdim's research lays property, policy, prices and process out in the open — turning them into facts you can understand and check. The more transparent the market, the stronger your position.
Helping you decide better
Fuller facts, more angles, better material — everything a sound judgement needs, laid out in front of you. That is the end purpose of all Zagdim research.
Want to see the method at work? Read our research and watch for three things: the source grade behind every number, the attribution on every developer claim, and the "Zagdim read" label.
Worked example ➔ Japan's "incident properties": how the culture-and-behaviour lens reads a market that prices death into housingContact Zagdim
A specific situation to ask about
Research describes the market; what you face is your own situation. If you would like help getting the facts organised and the options compared, say hi.
Start a WhatsApp chatCitations, interviews or corrections
Media and researchers are welcome to cite Zagdim's work (attribution is all we ask). Spotted an error? Tell us — public correction is part of the method.
[email protected]Industry partnerships
Content partnerships, data exchange or institutional collaboration — partner content is always labelled Sponsored and held to the same evidence rules. If that works for you, let's talk.
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