Anticipating critical transitions of the housing market: new evidence from China

We introduce a novel quantitative methodology to detect real estate bubbles and forecast their critical end time, which we apply to the housing markets of China's metropolises. Building on the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) model of self-reinforcing feedback loops, we use the quantile regression calibration approach recently introduced by two of us to build confidence intervals and explore possible distinct scenarios. We propose to consolidate the quantile regressions into the arithmetic average of the quantile-based LPPLS Confidence indicator, which accounts for the robustness of the calibration with respect to bootstrapped residuals. We make three main contributions to the literature of real estate bubbles. First, we verify the validity of the arithmetic average of the quantile-based LPPLS Confidence indicator by studying the critical times of historical housing price bubbles in the U.S., Hong Kong, U.K. and Canada. Second, the LPPLS detection methods are applied to provide early warning signals of the housing markets in some metropolises in China. Third, we determine the possible turning points of the markets in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Tianjin and Chengdu and anticipate critical transitions of China's housing markets via our multi-scales and multi-quantiles analyses. Finally, given these projections performed in February 2017, the price trajectories from March 2017 to January 2018 that became available from the time of submission to the time of revision of the present article offer quite unique genuine out-of-sample tests of the performances of our indicators.