Speculators and Middlemen: The Strategy and Performance of Investors in the Housing Market

Patrick Bayer, Christopher Geissler, Kyle Mangum, James W Roberts and Andrew Karolyi

The Review of Financial Studies, 2020, vol. 33, issue 11, 5212-5247

Abstract: Using data from the Los Angeles area from 1988 to 2012, we study the behavior and sources of returns of individual investors in the housing market. We document the existence of two distinct investor types. The first act as middlemen, purchasing substantially below and reselling above market prices throughout the cycle, improving liquidity and the existing capital stock in the process. The second act as speculators, who primarily enter during the boom, buying and selling at essentially market prices. Neither type anticipated the housing bust. We document similar behavior by speculators and middlemen in 96 other U.S. metro areas.

JEL-codes: D40 D84 R30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/rfs/hhaa042 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Speculators and Middlemen: The Strategy and Performance of Investors in the Housing Market (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:rfinst:v:33:y:2020:i:11:p:5212-5247.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Financial Studies is currently edited by Itay Goldstein

More articles in The Review of Financial Studies from Society for Financial Studies Oxford University Press, Journals Department, 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513 USA.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().