Three Essays on Sellers' Behavior in the Housing Market

Download or read book Three Essays on Sellers' Behavior in the Housing Market written by Svetoslava N. Alexandrova and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Housing markets exhibit some puzzling behavior that cannot be completely explained by rational market dynamics. The neoclassical economic theory posits that rational sellers and rational buyers in the housing market will look at the current market price in order to determine a value of a property. Studies, however, show that physiological biases may affect the decision- making process of both sellers and buyers.I examine the behavior of sellers in the housing market in three different settings. In Essay 1, I analyze the effects of the health of the housing market on mobility. In Essay 2, I study the effects of sellers' loss aversion on listing price and time on the market within the prospect theory framework. In Essay 3, I focus on identifying stress in the housing market by developing a stress index and commencing the design of an Early Warning System that incorporates signals from the market and behaviors from sellers to indicate increasing levels of pressure. I utilize a data set of private home sale transactions of corporate relocations for the period 2004-2014. The results of the first study from the stepwise logit models on series of economic variables and demographic factors show that relocating employees facing negative equity situations and equity less than 5% of home value have a greater chance of rejecting relocation while economic factors like affordability and credit availability have a positive effect on their ability to move. Essay 2 results indicate that a seller who faces a loss will set up an asking price 5.69 percent higher than they would otherwise. Additionally, sellers facing a loss will experience a reduction in the hazard rate of sale resulting in longer time on the market while income and family status have effect on loss aversion and time on market. In the last essay, I hypothesize that economic signals and home sellers' behaviors can explain the variability of the housing market stress index proxied by a transformed S&P 500/Case Shiller Index. The preliminary results of the autoregressive models find that housing variables and market expectations of the 'informed sellers' have statistically significant explanatory power.