IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hfa/wpaper/25-01.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Male and Female Gap in Home Appraisals

Author

Listed:
  • Joshua Bosshardt

    (Federal Housing Finance Agency)

  • Simi Kedia

    (Rutgers University)

  • Tim Zhang

    (University of Texas at San Antonio)

Abstract

Using 24 million appraisals for refinance mortgages over the January 2013 to March 2024 period and comparing homes in the same census tract and year-quarter, we find that homes of single female households are appraised for 2.4% less than those of single men. Appraisers make lower adjustments to comparable properties and give worse house condition ratings for single female homes. The gap is less pronounced when borrowers have unisex names and when appraisers have greater exposure to single female homeowners. The lower appraisal values of single female households are associated with higher interest rates, lower loan amounts and lower cash-out amounts in the refinancing. Our findings indicate that the gap in appraisals may be one reason for (female) homeowners’ sluggish refinancing activity and the gap in household wealth.

Suggested Citation

  • Joshua Bosshardt & Simi Kedia & Tim Zhang, 2025. "The Male and Female Gap in Home Appraisals," FHFA Staff Working Papers 25-01, Federal Housing Finance Agency.
    • Handle: RePEc:hfa:wpaper:25-01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.fhfa.gov/document/wp2501.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.fhfa.gov/research/papers/wp2501
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    the male and female gap; home appraisals; mortgage refinance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • G21 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Banks; Other Depository Institutions; Micro Finance Institutions; Mortgages
    • J16 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of Gender; Non-labor Discrimination

    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:hfa:wpaper:25-01. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: William Doerner (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/fhfaaus.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.