What drives you to relocate your home? Investigating preferences and residential mismatching of recent (prior to COVID and during-after COVID) movers in the Greater Toronto Area.

This paper presents a survey of homeowners and renters who moved within or into the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), Canada, since January 2016. This timeline covers pre- and during-COVID movers. The survey investigates households' residential preferences and the potential dissonance between their preferred and actual residential location choices. The respondents are asked to answer questions about their previous and current residences, their housing search, and hypothetical residential location choices given the option of telecommuting. Empirical analysis of the actual and hypothetical residential location choices is conducted through a joint revealed preference and stated preference (RP-SP) error component mixed logit model. The model estimations identify discrepancies between RP and SP choices, indicating the presence of residential dissonance. The positive effect of transit accessibility variables shows that people are more likely to choose residential locations with better accessibility. However, dissonance in transit accessibility is found in both models, suggesting homeowners and renters may settle for lower accessibility in real life. Moreover, the model results show that homeowners and renters are more likely to relocate when working remotely, indicating the significant influence of telecommuting on residential dissonance.