Local Housing Market Research Articles

Measuring local affordability: variations between housing market areas

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address both the measurement of affordability and variations in affordability between local housing market areas (HMAs).Design/methodology/approachThe practical data issues that arise from measuring local affordability are reviewed by reference to studies in the UK. The paper argues that local measures should relate to a functional geography of HMAs rather than simply local authority boundaries. This approach is shown to be more theoretically sound but faces data constraints. An empirical case study of the North West of England then follows as a demonstration based on a tiered geography of HMAs. It addresses the constraints on local income data by measuring affordability by reference to a particular household type and associated income.FindingsLocal UK affordability indicators are shown to be primarily about access to home ownership rather than a wider view of local house price structures on affordability. The paper also draws out the importance of affordability measures linked to functional market areas. The results of the analysis presented highlight that there are local differences in house price structures and hence associated differential affordability of house types between local HMAs.Originality/valueThis is the first study that examines affordability at the local level based on functional areas rather than local authority administrative boundaries. This approach gives a truer picture of the variability in local affordability. The applied analysis tackles the data constraints of functional areas and has the potential to be adapted and extended.

Transformation of Urban Mining Brownfields into Green Spaces and Local Housing Market Effects

Converting brownfields into green spaces and recreation areas creates a significant community asset. To date, however, remediation efforts have focused mainly on utilizing brownfields as productive properties in order to lessen financial costs and risks. The use of environmental economics has proved beneficial in providing a clear answer in regard to the social value of derelict land redevelopment. Using an illustrative example, the paper demonstrates the use of an expert judgment technique, namely the Fuzzy Delphi Method, which is applied as an alternative to approaches commonly used for the valuation of urban green spaces.

Hazardous Waste Hits Hollywood: Superfund and Housing Prices in Los Angeles

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the effect of various actions taken by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as the Superfund Program, on housing prices. This study uses a housing transaction panel dataset encompassing the five major counties of the Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area to estimate the program's influence on the local housing market.

Immigrant location and network effects: the Helvetic case

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is try to answer the following question: to which extent the observed location pattern is driven by network effects or by traditional location factors, like the structure and behaviour of the local labour market, housing market, public goods, and local tax rates? Design/methodology/approach – The paper uses an econometric model derived from random utility maximization. This model is estimated on a panel of Helvetic labor market areas, using a two stages estimation method. The first stage allows the network effect to be estimated. In the second stage, it estimates the impact of standard location factors. Findings – The paper finds evidence of a very strong network effect. This network effect is a very important location factor and implies that a location may attract current immigrants mainly because it attracted previous immigrants, even if the traditional location factors are not a source of attractiveness. Research limitations/implications – The present study corroborates earlier work on the Italian case. There is still some work to be done for taking account of the highly localized nature of network externalities. Originality/value – The impact of network on migrants' behavior is a hotly debated issue. However, there is almost no analysis of this impact on migrants' location. Conversely, if the high level of concentration of immigrants is a well known stylized fact, there is almost no study of the factors explaining this concentration. The research starts filling these two gaps.

Repairing a Mortgage Crisis: HOLC Lending and Its Impact on Local Housing Markets

Between 1933 and 1936 the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation purchased more than a million delinquent mortgages from private lenders and refinanced those loans for the borrowers. Its primary goal was to break the cycle of foreclosure, forced property sales and decreases in home values that was affecting local housing markets throughout the nation. We find that the volume of HOLC lending was related to measures of distress in local (county-level) housing markets and that these interventions increased 1940 median home values and homeownership rates, but not new home building.“[A] tremendous surge of residential building in the [last] decade… was matched by an ever-increasing supply of homes sold on easy terms [and only]… a small decline in prices was necessary to wipe out this equity. Unfortunately, deflationary processes are never satisfied with small declines in values. They feed upon themselves and produce results out of all proportion to their causes… In the field of real estate finance, particularly, we have depended so much upon credit that our whole value structure can be thrown out of balance by relatively slight shocks. When such a delicate structure is once disorganized, it is a tremendous task to get it into a position where it can again function normally.”1Henry Hoagland, 1935

A SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL AUTOREGRESSIVE LOCAL ESTIMATION FOR THE PARIS HOUSING MARKET

This original study examines the potential of a spatiotemporal autoregressive Local (LSTAR) approach in modeling transaction prices for the housing market in inner Paris. We use a data set from the Paris Region notary office (Chambre des notaires d’Ile-de-France) which consists of approximately 250,000 transactions units between the first quarter of 1990 and the end of 2005. We use the exact X–Y coordinates and transaction date to spatially and temporally sort each transaction. We first choose to use the STAR approach proposed by Pace et al., 1998. This method incorporates a spatiotemporal filtering process into the conventional hedonic function and attempts to correct for spatial and temporal correlative effects. We find significant estimates of spatial dependence effects. Moreover, using an original methodology, we find evidence of a strong presence of both spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the model. It suggests that spatial and temporal drifts in households socio-economic profiles and local housing market structure effects are certainly major determinants of the price level for the Paris Housing Market.

Subprime Loan Default Resolutions: Do They Vary Across Mortgage Products and Borrower Demographic Groups?

This paper examines default outcomes for subprime first lien loans during the recent subprime mortgage boom. It conducts this investigation in two phases. The paper first examines factors associated with pre-foreclosure outcomes for subprime mortgages in default. It then examines factors associated with different outcomes for loans that enter foreclosure. These factors include less understood elements such as mortgage product features and borrower demographics. The analysis is based on detailed loan-level data and employs multinomial logit models in a hazard framework. Results show that default resolutions vary with product features and borrower demographics. Adjustable rate and interest-only mortgages, and loans with low- or no-documentation are more likely to enter foreclosure proceedings, and, once in foreclosure, are more likely to become REO. The existence of junior liens increases the probability of the loan remaining in default. Owner-occupancy is associated with lower likelihood of foreclosure initiation and REO, and greater likelihood of curing default. Additionally, default outcomes are impacted by local legal, economic and housing market conditions, and the equity in the home.

International Students as an Influence on Residential Change: A Case Study of the City of Melbourne

Australia has attracted a very large number of international students over the past decade. This paper has analysed residential development in an inner city location to show how the interaction between the commercial property industry, local urban policy and a specific source of demand shape what have been labeled “new build” outcomes in the gentrification of inner city areas. The paper focuses on the approach that draws upon the simultaneous effects of property market circumstances, urban policy and student demand. In this approach the paper looks beyond the traditional view of labour market driven gentrification of the central city (associated with the residential choices of producer service employees) and shows that student demand has been the prominent factor. It also shows how that demand has been spatially concentrated and contributed in particular to major change in a few parts of the city. A review of policy showed that the encouragement of residential development in the city of Melbourne was substantial. The Melbourne experience differs from the outcomes in US and UK cities described in previous papers that show impacts on local housing market have been seen as negative. The consequences for Melbourne are more deep-seated, and linked to broader social attitudes.

Serial Persistence and Risk Structure of Local Housing Market

This paper investigated serial correlations and the risk structure of local house price movements for single family homes. It was found house price changes were strongly correlated over time, but the market risk structure (variance of price changes) was specific to location differences and varied largely depending on different measurement intervals. For the monthly measurement interval, the market risk was close to a linear form. However, measured quarterly, the market risk tended to follow a quadratic form for a shorter time period up to 8 quarters and after that, the actual risk form seemed to sit in between the linear and quadratic forms. These findings have important implications in developing a house price index based on the weighted repeated sales (WRS) method.

A Multivariate Study of Medium Density Housing Development and Neighbourhood Change Within Australian Cities

The introduction of medium density housing development within suburban areas has been favoured by government as a means of improving the efficiency of land use, reducing the costs associated with the delivery of government infrastructure and services, increasing the opportunity for affordable housing and balancing social mix. However, it has been hypothesised that such development may be having a negative impact on local neighbourhoods in terms of social structure; for example, reducing diversity as measured by economic status and family makeup or in terms of local housing market performance as measured by price. This paper considers whether such outcomes are able to be measured in terms of social structure and housing market performance for three Australian cities: Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne between 2001 and 2006. The analysis is conducted at a disaggregated level to more accurately measure impacts at the local level. The paper attempts to identify whether medium density housing development has any impact on housing market performance at a suburb level as measured by median price and if there are associated changes in neighbourhood structure as measured by social constructs developed using the technique of principal components analysis.

Modelling Price Movements in Housing Micro Markets

This study identifies housing sub-markets (micro markets) that may be price leaders within local housing market areas and relates their performance to potentially relevant economic factors. This can be important as it provides both policy-makers and market players with a useful barometer regarding housing market behaviour. The study uses cointegration analysis to find those markets that interact with each other over the long run and isolates housing sub-markets that are not influenced by housing market behaviour elsewhere in the local urban economy. The study lays the basis for research aimed at identifying whether different housing markets respond to the same or to different economic stimuli. The research is likely to be of interest to policy-makers (such as town planners) as well as to developers and lending institutions.

Mortgage Loan as a Means of Home Finance in Urban China: A Comparative Study of Guangzhou and Shanghai

This paper examines home financing in China, using data from household surveys conducted in Guangzhou and Shanghai. The nationwide Housing Provident Fund is still of minor importance. The majority of homebuyers continue to rely heavily on personal savings and parental contributions to finance home purchase. Mortgages are gaining importance, with slightly less than one-third of the purchases employing this means. Demographic attributes have relatively minor effects on mortgage loan utilisation. Socio-economic status is of somewhat greater significance; however, it exhibits contrasting effects in Guangzhou and Shanghai, which may be attributed to the difference in local housing market conditions. Migrants are discriminated by their hukou status. The findings show hukou status affects access to mortgage primarily through its impacts on the job market.

Loss aversion, equity constraints and seller behavior in the real estate market

I develop an estimation strategy that can point identify the effects of loss aversion and equity constraints on selling prices using a long panel of data from the San Francisco Bay Area real estate market. I find strong evidence that owners facing nominal losses on their housing investments and owners with high LTV ratios sell for higher prices, on average, and the effects are larger than previously thought. I also present new empirical findings that support the theory that down-payment constraints or other institutional details of the mortgage market drive the relationship between LTV and prices. The results have implications for understanding how local housing market variables such as prices and volume are determined in slow markets.

Repairing a Mortgage Crisis: HOLC Lending and its Impact on Local Housing Markets

The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation purchased more than a million delinquent mortgages from private lenders between 1933 and 1936 and refinanced the loans for the borrowers. Its primary goal was to break the cycle of foreclosure, forced property sales and decreases in home values that was affecting local housing markets throughout the nation. We find that HOLC loans were targeted at local (county-level) housing markets that had experienced severe distress and that the intervention increased 1940 median home values and homeownership rates, but not new home building.

Silver Bullet or Trojan Horse? The Effects of Inclusionary Zoning on Local Housing Markets in the United States

Many local governments are adopting inclusionary zoning (IZ) as a means of producing affordable housing without direct public subsidies. In this paper, panel data on IZ in the San Francisco metropolitan area and suburban Boston are used to analyse how much affordable housing the programmes produce and how IZ affects the prices and production of market-rate housing. The amount of affordable housing produced under IZ has been modest and depends primarily on how long IZ has been in place. Results from suburban Boston suggest that IZ has contributed to increased housing prices and lower rates of production during periods of regional house price appreciation. In the San Francisco area, IZ also appears to increase housing prices in times of regional price appreciation, but to decrease prices during cooler regional markets. There is no evidence of a statistically significant effect of IZ on new housing development in the Bay Area.

The International Transmission of House Price Shocks

In order to assess transmission mechanisms between global and domestic house prices, and possibly contagion effects, we use a large database of macroeconomic variables for OECD countries. We extract common factors to summarize the comovements of the variables and include them in stationary FAVAR models. We mainly focus on the pandemic view of contagion where local shocks, originating from a country or a local housing market, spread out to other domestic housing markets. An interesting finding is that, even allowing for other channels of international transmission (through global interest rates, or activity), the US real house price, which appears to be exogenous in the US dynamics, unidirectionally causes the international house price factor, which in turn causes the domestic real house price growth for several countries. The channels of contagion from the US appears therefore to be either direct, through house prices (in particular in the UK or Spain), or indirect through other variables

Dynamic Asset Pricing in a System of Local Housing Markets

For most people , buying a house is one of the most significant investment decisions of their lifetimes. Economists have mainly focused on the consumption aspects of this process. For example , a typical model in urban economics might frame the decision of where to live as a discrete choice over a bundle of housing and neighborhood attributes such as location , square footage , schooling options, and crime levels. The investment side of the problem has received considerably less atten tion , a surprising omission since housing assets constitute approximately two-thirds of the aver age American household’s financial portfolio , serve an important role in saving for retirement and, as has become increasingly apparent , can be quite risky. This paper views housing markets from an asset-pricing perspective, using finance theory to relate the risk premium of a housing asset (the difference between its expected return and the return for a risk-free investment) to its exposure to risk. As usual in finance, what matters for the risk premium of a housing asset is its exposure to systematic risk, not idiosyncratic risk. In our model, there are two forms of systematic risk to which housing assets are exposed: national risk (which is common to houses everywhere) and local risk (which affects all houses within a given metropolitan area, but nowhere else). Houses are said to be of the same type h if they are located in the same metropolitan area and have the same exposure to systematic risk. Our main conclusions are that (1) houses of every type face a common set of risk prices (λ * for the national risk and λ m for the local risk specific to

New Housing Supply and the Dilution of Social Capital

This paper examines the role of local housing market conditions for social capital accumulation and neighborhood club good provision. A model of individual investment decisions predicts that in a setting with high property transaction costs (i) homeowners are more likely to invest in social capital than renters and (ii) the positive link between homeownership and social capital is stronger in more built-up neighborhoods with inelastic supply of new housing. In these neighborhoods homeowners are largely protected from inflows of newcomers that would dilute the net benefit from social capital in the longer run. Empirical evidence from the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey confirms the model predictions. Instrumental variable estimates suggest that the effects are causal.

Local Housing Market Cycle and Loss Given Default: Evidence from Sub-Prime Residential Mortgages

This paper studies the impact of housing market cycles on loss given default (LGD). Previous studies have shown that the current loan-to-value ratio (CLTV) is the most important determinant of LGD. This paper establishes another linkage which is between the house price cycles before the time of mortgage origination and LGD. The empirical analysis is based on a large loan-level sub-prime residential mortgage loss dataset from 1998 to 2009. Results show that house price history has a long memory in explaining LGD. Its explanatory power far exceeds the original LTV and other loan characteristics. This paper offers a countercyclical view of LGD risk. The model can be combined with a default probability model to serve as a regulatory prudential tool. Such a tool provides a solution to the inherent procyclical bias in BASEL II capital requirements, and can contribute to the safety and soundness of banking institutions.

Local Housing Market Cycle and Loss Given Default: Evidence From Sub-Prime Residential Mortgages

This paper studies the impact of housing market cycles on loss given default (LGD). Previous studies have shown that the current loan-to-value ratio (CLTV) is the most important determinant of LGD. This paper establishes another linkage which is between the house price cycles before the time of mortgage origination and LGD. The empirical analysis is based on a large loan-level sub-prime residential mortgage loss dataset from 1998 to 2009. Results show that house price history has a long memory in explaining LGD. Its explanatory power far exceeds the original LTV and other loan characteristics. This paper offers a countercyclical view of LGD risk. The model can be combined with a default probability model to serve as a regulatory prudential tool. Such a tool provides a solution to the inherent procyclical bias in BASEL II capital requirements, and can contribute to the safety and soundness of banking institutions.