An Empirical Research on the Relationship between Real Estate Prices and Inflation

Abstract

The former researches referring to inflation and real estate prices concentrated mainly on the stock prices rather than the real estate prices. Owing to the enlarging ratio of real estate industry in national economy with each passing day, as well as the overheating real estate prices in recent years, the relationship between real estate prices and inflation is particularly vital to the monetary policy making for the monetary authorities. According to the test analysis of data from 2001 to 2009, it is found that real estate prices is Granger Cause of inflation while inflation is not the Granger Cause of real estate prices in this paper. Through the Effects of Wealth, Credit and Tobin, real estate prices drive the growth of social consumption and investments and expand the total social demand which possess an positive effect on inflation; nevertheless the rising of real estate prices causes the rising of currency for real estate purchasing, which, under the circumstance of that currency supply remains, will inevitably bring about the reduction of currency for other consumption and investments and restrain the total social demand which would mean a suppression of continuous rising of prices of other commodity and labor service. All these show that real estate also has a negative effect on inflation. The cancellations between the two effects make the long-term influence real estate bearing on inflation is not obvious. The experimental results indicate that when the price of real estate rises 1%, inflation only rises 0.058%. Consequently, a strict controlling of the amount of money issued is the key factor for keeping the over rapid rising of real estate prices from leading to inflation.