The city of Turin is segmented in 40 cadastral Microzones, approved by the City Council in June 1999, which are set up as independent segments of the real estate market. Eighteen years have passed since the approval of the division of the city into homogeneous spatial segments, a period of time in which the pattern of the city has changed, both on the level of urban planning and due to the important changes in the real estate market, most notably the economic-financial crisis which has led to a steady decrease of prices from 2010 to date. Over the past few years, prior to upgrading the Microzones, the Turin Real Estate Market Observatory (TREMO) conducted a series of studies including the segmentation of the Microzones in Historical Territorial Units (HTU), identified on the basis of a historical-urban analysis of the area without questioning the boundaries of the Microzones. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the HTUs and to examine the contribution that a territorial unit smaller than the Microzone can give to the explanation of property prices, taking into account that when decreasing the territorial extension, one has to manage even less representative data samples. In order to study the explanatory capacity of the positional variable, together with a series of variables related to the features of the apartments and buildings in the price determination process, a hedonic model was applied by using a sample of housing units offered on the market during the four-year period 2013-2016. In particular, starting from the territorial segmentation of the Microzones in the HTUs, a traditional hedonic model was applied: in the first application, the Microzone positional variable was assumed, whereas in the second, the HTUs were adopted. Both applications generated significant results, with a high coefficient of determination (Adjusted R2) and an excellent explanatory capacity of the variables considered. The importance of the “location”, taken into consideration through the Microzones or through the HTUs, is historically recognized even at an international level and continues to be one of the most important features in the listing price determination process, even during the crisis period of the real estate market
