“Flip This House”: Investor Speculation and the Housing Bubble

Andrew Haughwout, Donghoon Lee, Joseph Tracy and Wilbert van der Klaauw

No 20111205, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: The recent financial crisis—the worst in eighty years—had its origins in the enormous increase and subsequent collapse in housing prices during the 2000s. While the housing bubble has been the subject of intense public debate and research, no single answer has emerged to explain why prices rose so fast and fell so precipitously. In this post, we present new findings from our recent New York Fed study that uses unique data to suggest that real estate “investors”—borrowers who use financial leverage in the form of mortgage credit to purchase multiple residential properties—played a previously unrecognized, but very important, role. These investors likely helped push prices up during 2004-06; but when prices turned down in early 2006, they defaulted in large numbers and thereby contributed importantly to the intensity of the housing cycle’s downward leg.

Keywords: FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel; mortgage defaults; Real Estate Investors (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D1 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-12-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2011 ... -housing-bubble.html Full text (text/html)

Related works:
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:fip:fednls:86779

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().