Housing Market Activity Research Articles

Seasonal Influences in Australian Housing Markets

This paper examines the impact of seasonal influences on housing market activity. Empirical tests examine the influence of a quarterly season on the demand for housing and the observed real house price changes. Empirical tests are specifically designed for a ‘short’ time-series, 1988-95. The explanatory power of the statistical tests is improved by ‘stacking’ regional data to perform more robust tests for seasonality. The results confirm significant seasonal influences. The volume of transactions and hence demand is greatest during the first quarter of a year and lowest during the last quarter. The observed real house price changes are highest in the first quarter of a year and lowest during the third quarter.

Community Reinvestment and Credit Risk: Evidence from an Affordable‐Home‐Loan Program

This study examines the performance of home purchase loans originated by a major depository institution in Philadelphia under a flexible lending program between 1988 and 1994. We examine long‐term delinquency in relation to neighborhood housing market conditions, borrower credit‐history scores and other factors. We find that likelihood of delinquency declines with increasing neighborhood housing market activity. Also, likelihood of delinquency is greater for borrowers with low credit‐history scores and those with high ratios of housing expense to income, and when the property is unusually expensive for the neighborhood where it is located.

Using Attitude Data to Forecast Housing Activity

Several national surveys generate monthly indicators of housing market activity that are released weeks before the hard housing statistics (starts, new home sales, existing home sales) for that m...

CONSUMER DURABLES SPENDING AND HOUSING MARKET ACTIVITY

Recent British experience suggests important relationships between housing market activity and consumer durables spending. This paper examines direct and indirect relationships; the former through the complementarity of housing and durable goods, the latter through housing equity withdrawal effects. Aggregate U.K. time-series econometric evidence is presented that finds significant evidence for both effects. An estimate of the elasticity of durables spending with respect to house prices of 0.4 is obtained for 1988. The authors conclude that this is further evidence of the important role of the housing market in the U.K. macroeconomy. Copyright 1992 by Scottish Economic Society.

Hedonic analysis of a housing market in disequilibrium

This paper tests the hypothesis that information about housing market activity and about specific dwellings becomes capitalized into single family dwelling prices through a disequilibrium adjustment process. A dynamic price adjustment model, which is an extension of the standard hedonic model widely used in the literature, is derived, specified, and tested with both micro and aggregated data from the city of Chicago and for the period 1972–1976. The results show that from 32 to 75% of the variance in dwelling prices, unexplained by the standard hedonic attributes under assumptions of equilibrium, is explained by market activity signals such as mortgage interest rates and neighborhood transaction rates of the preceding period. Dwellings about which there is less information, making comparison pricing difficult, are shown to command a price premium. The standard equilibrium hypothesis appears readily rejectable and better predictions are obtained from the disequilibrium specifications. Several directions for extending this line of research are discussed.

Patterns of Change in Housing Market Activity in Revitalizing Neighborhoods

Abstract This study represents an initial attempt to identify whether or not private market reinvestment in twelve revitalizing neighborhoods progressed through a clearly identifiable sequence of change. The central finding is that the trends observed in the revitalizing neighborhoods differ in many ways from the descriptions of the process contained in the various “stage” descriptions of revitalization. Changes in property renovation, sales prices, sales volume, speculation, and the conversion of rental properties to owner occupancy were often discontinuous and abrupt. Furthermore, many of the changes occurred simultaneously, rather than in an orderly sequence where changes in one indicator predictably preceded changes in other indicators. Much of the fluctuation in housing market activity and the often parallel changes observed in the indicators appear to reflect the influence of the nationwide housing recession of the mid-1970s.

Interregional differences in housing market activity

Interregional differences in housing market activity