IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/bphupl/qt41k6c76w.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Housing Price Dynamics in Time and Space: Predictability, Liquidity and Investor Returns

Author

Listed:
  • Hwang, Min
  • Quigley, John M.

Abstract

It is widely accepted that aggregate housing prices are predictable, but that excess returns to investors are precluded by the transactions costs of buying and selling property. We examine this issue using a unique data set -- all private condominium transactions in Singapore during an eleven-year period. We model directly the price discovery process for individual dwellings. Our empirical results clearly reject a random walk in prices, supporting mean reversion in housing prices and diffusion of innovations over space. We find that, when house prices and aggregate returns are computed from models that erroneously assume a random walk and spatial independence, they are strongly autocorrelated. However, when they are calculated from the appropriate model, predictability in prices and in investment returns is completely absent. We show that this is due to the illiquid nature of housing transactions. We also conduct extensive simulations, over different time horizons and with different investment rules, testing whether better information on housing price dynamics leads to superior investment performance.

Suggested Citation

  • Hwang, Min & Quigley, John M., 2010. "Housing Price Dynamics in Time and Space: Predictability, Liquidity and Investor Returns," Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series qt41k6c76w, Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy.
  • Handle: RePEc:cdl:bphupl:qt41k6c76w
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/41k6c76w.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. John V. Duca, 2005. "Making sense of elevated housing prices," Southwest Economy, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, issue Sep, pages 1,7-13.
    2. Malpezzi, Stephen, 1999. "A Simple Error Correction Model of House Prices," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(1), pages 27-62, March.
    3. Sing, Tien Foo, 2001. "Dynamics of the Condominium Market in Singapore," International Real Estate Review, Global Social Science Institute, vol. 4(1), pages 135-158.
    4. Englund, Peter & Gordon, Tracy M. & Quigley, John M., 1999. "The Valuation of Real Capital: A Random Walk down Kungsgatan," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 205-216, September.
    5. Englund, Peter & Hwang, Min & Quigley, John M, 2002. "Hedging Housing Risk," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 24(1-2), pages 167-200, Jan.-Marc.
    6. Hill, R. Carter & Sirmans, C. F. & Knight, John R., 1999. "A random walk down main street?," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 89-103, January.
    7. K. J. Martijn Cremers & Jianping Mei, 2007. "Turning over Turnover," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 20(6), pages 1749-1782, November.
    8. Hong, Yongmiao, 1996. "Consistent Testing for Serial Correlation of Unknown Form," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(4), pages 837-864, July.
    9. Guntermann, Karl L & Norrbin, Stefan C, 1991. "Empirical Tests of Real Estate Market Efficiency," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 4(3), pages 297-313, September.
    10. Quigley, John M., 2002. "Transactions Costs and Housing Markets," Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy, Working Paper Series qt6pz8p6zt, Berkeley Program on Housing and Urban Policy.
    11. Jesse M. Abraham & William S. Schauman, 1991. "New Evidence on Home Prices from Freddie Mac Repeat Sales," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 19(3), pages 333-352, September.
    12. Quan, Daniel C & Quigley, John M, 1991. "Price Formation and the Appraisal Function in Real Estate Markets," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 127-146, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Holly, Sean & Hashem Pesaran, M. & Yamagata, Takashi, 2011. "The spatial and temporal diffusion of house prices in the UK," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 2-23, January.
    2. Andrew Coleman & Grant Scobie, 2009. "A Simple Model of Housing Rental and Ownership with Policy Simulations," Working Papers 09_08, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.
    3. Marius Claudy and Claus Michelsen, 2016. "Housing Market Fundamentals, Housing Quality and Energy Consumption: Evidence from Germany," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 4).
    4. Garner, Thesia I. & Verbrugge, Randal, 2009. "Reconciling user costs and rental equivalence: Evidence from the US consumer expenditure survey," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 18(3), pages 172-192, September.
    5. L. Li & K. W. Chau, 2019. "What Motivates a Developer to Sell before Completion?," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 59(2), pages 209-232, August.
    6. Liang Jiang & Peter C.B. Phillips & Jun Yu, 2014. "A New Hedonic Regression for Real Estate Prices Applied to the Singapore Residential Market," Working Papers 19-2014, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
    7. Stanley McGreal & Paloma Taltavull de La Paz, 2013. "Implicit House Prices: Variation over Time and Space in Spain," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(10), pages 2024-2043, August.
    8. Paloma Taltavull de La Paz, 2021. "Predicting housing prices. A long term housing price path for Spanish regions," LARES lares-2021-4dra, Latin American Real Estate Society (LARES).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hjalmarsson, Erik & Hjalmarsson, Randi, 2009. "Efficiency in housing markets: Which home buyers know how to discount?," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 33(11), pages 2150-2163, November.
    2. Hjalmarsson, Erik & Hjalmarsson, Randi, 2006. "Efficiency In Housing Markets: Do Home Buyers Know How To Discount?," Working Papers in Economics 232, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    3. Hwang, Min & Quigley, John M., 2002. "Price Discovery in Time and Space: The Course of Condominium Prices in Singapore," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt260185hr, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.
    4. Jan Rouwendal, 2009. "Housing Wealth and Household Portfolios in an Ageing Society," De Economist, Springer, vol. 157(1), pages 1-48, March.
    5. Ghysels, Eric & Plazzi, Alberto & Valkanov, Rossen & Torous, Walter, 2013. "Forecasting Real Estate Prices," Handbook of Economic Forecasting, in: G. Elliott & C. Granger & A. Timmermann (ed.), Handbook of Economic Forecasting, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 509-580, Elsevier.
    6. Luis A. Gil-Alana & Rangan Gupta & Fernando Perez de Gracia, 2016. "Persistence, mean reversion and non-linearities in the US housing prices over 1830--2013," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 48(34), pages 3244-3252, July.
    7. Røed Larsen, Erling & Weum, Steffen, 2008. "Testing the efficiency of the Norwegian housing market," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 510-517, September.
    8. Liang Jiang & Peter C.B. Phillips & Jun Yu, 2014. "A New Hedonic Regression for Real Estate Prices Applied to the Singapore Residential Market," Working Papers 19-2014, Singapore Management University, School of Economics.
    9. Tsai, I-Chun, 2019. "Relationships among regional housing markets: Evidence on adjustments of housing burden," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 309-318.
    10. A Brint, 2009. "Predicting a house's selling price through inflating its previous selling price," Journal of the Operational Research Society, Palgrave Macmillan;The OR Society, vol. 60(3), pages 339-347, March.
    11. Alex Minne & Marc Francke & David Geltner & Robert White, 2020. "Using Revisions as a Measure of Price Index Quality in Repeat-Sales Models," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 60(4), pages 514-553, May.
    12. Paulo M.M. Rodrigues & Rita Fradique Lourenço, 2014. "The Dynamics and Contrast of House Prices in Portugal and Spain," Economic Bulletin and Financial Stability Report Articles and Banco de Portugal Economic Studies, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.
    13. Ortalo-Magne, Francois & Rady, Sven, 2002. "Tenure choice and the riskiness of non-housing consumption," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 11(3), pages 266-279, September.
    14. Erling Røed Larsen & Dag Einar Sommervoll, 2003. "Rising Inequality of Housing? Evidence from Segmented Housing Price Indices," Discussion Papers 363, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    15. Yongheng Deng & John Quigley, 2008. "Index Revision, House Price Risk, and the Market for House Price Derivatives," The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, Springer, vol. 37(3), pages 191-209, October.
    16. Quan Gan & Robert J. Hill, 2008. "A New Perspective on the Relationship Between House Prices and Income," Discussion Papers 2008-13, School of Economics, The University of New South Wales.
    17. Glaeser, Edward L., 2014. "Understanding housing: The intellectual legacy of John Quigley," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 3-12.
    18. Tracy M. Turner & Daigyo Seo, 2007. "Investment Risk And The Transition Into Homeownership," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(2), pages 229-253, May.
    19. John M. Quigley & Christian L. Redfearn, 2000. "Investment Returns and Price Discovery in the Market for Owner-Occupied Housing," Working Paper 8640, USC Lusk Center for Real Estate.
    20. John Clithero & Nathan Pealer, 2005. "Is There A Housing Bubble in Irvine, California? A Repeat-Sales Analysis Using a New Data Set," International Real Estate Review, Global Social Science Institute, vol. 8(1), pages 110-127.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    housing market liquidity; price discovery; spatial correlation; Social and Behavioral Sciences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E31 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Price Level; Inflation; Deflation
    • C23 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Single Equation Models; Single Variables - - - Models with Panel Data; Spatio-temporal Models
    • R32 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location - - - Other Spatial Production and Pricing Analysis

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:bphupl:qt41k6c76w. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ibbrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.