Cost of credit, mortgage demand and house prices

Abstract

This paper studies the relationship between mortgage rates and house prices. We exploit a subsidized mortgage program that reduced the mortgage rates of state-owned banks in Turkey during the summer of 2020 as an exogenous shock to provide causal estimates of a decrease in the cost of credit on mortgage demand and house prices. The effects are estimated using a detailed dataset on all house sales with mortgages. We find that a 1 percentage point decrease in annual mortgage rates led to an increase in individual mortgage loans by 3.3% and an increase in house prices by 1.6%.