1 Understanding Housing Markets: Real Progress or Stalled Agendas? Duncan Maclennan HOUSING MARKETS: WIDE INTERESTS, NARROW THEORIES? Discussions about housing markets appear daily in the media and press of most coun- tries and they underpin, along with indivi- duals’ experiences, frequent conversations around dinner tables, on aeroplanes, eleva- tors and staff common rooms. Everybody, now, has a model of the housing market. Different, more technical and more evidence- rich debates about housing market outcomes are commonplace in municipalities, planning departments and the law courts. Diverse analytical perspectives, with equally varied empirical content and approaches, on hous- ing markets are recurrently unfolded in the academic journals of core disciplines and, more commonly, specialist housing and urban journals. The currency of ‘housing markets’ as an area of interest is hardly surprising given both the causes and consequences of the recent Great Financial Crash (GFC); see Smith and Searle (2010). However, public debate and published literature contains not one understanding of the notion of housing market but many. Again, that variety is unsurprising as there are commonly simplifi- cations between the academy and the polity. But in the context of housing market analysis and debate there is a reasonable concern that while there are different conceptions of hous- ing market that are valid and useful, they lack any intellectual coherence. The burden on analysts and commentators is to be clear on what conception of housing market they are using and why. In reality, even within academia there is a lack of clarity about the meanings of ‘housing markets’, why they are important and why they need to be researched and rethought (see Chapters 6 and 7). Some writing within academia aims to push forward theoretical understandings and to develop new conceptual models. Although theoretically informed, the vast bulk of pub- lished research on housing and cities is potentially valuable because it provides