IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedgfe/2014-73.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Long-Term Vacancy in the United States

Author

Abstract

Because housing is durable, the housing supply is slow to adapt to declines in demand. This paper uses long-term vacancy--defined as nonseasonal housing units that have been vacant for an unusually long period of time--to quantify the extent of excess supply in the housing market. I find that long-term vacancy is less than 2 percent of all nonseasonal housing units and accounts for only one quarter of the aggregate increase in nonseasonal vacancy from 2001 to 2011. Thus, at the national level, excess supply is considerably less extensive than indicated by traditional measures of vacancy. However, the stock of long-term vacant housing is concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods that do have appreciably high long-term vacancy rates. Some of these neighborhoods have characteristics suggesting that excess supply is related to overbuilding during the housing boom, while others have characteristics that are symptomatic of persistently weak housing demand.

Suggested Citation

  • Raven S. Molloy, 2014. "Long-Term Vacancy in the United States," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2014-73, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2014-73
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/feds/2014/files/201473pap.pdf
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Edward L. Glaeser & Joseph Gyourko, 2005. "Urban Decline and Durable Housing," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 113(2), pages 345-375, April.
    2. David Genesove & Christopher Mayer, 2001. "Loss Aversion and Seller Behavior: Evidence from the Housing Market," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 116(4), pages 1233-1260.
    3. Hartley, Daniel, 2014. "The effect of foreclosures on nearby housing prices: Supply or dis-amenity?," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 108-117.
    4. Guasch, J. Luis & Marshall, Robert C., 1985. "An analysis of vacancy patterns in the rental housing market," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 17(2), pages 208-229, March.
    5. Wheaton, William C, 1990. "Vacancy, Search, and Prices in a Housing Market Matching Model," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 98(6), pages 1270-1292, December.
    6. Whitaker, Stephan & Fitzpatrick IV, Thomas J., 2013. "Deconstructing distressed-property spillovers: The effects of vacant, tax-delinquent, and foreclosed properties in housing submarkets," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(2), pages 79-91.
    7. Rosen, Kenneth T & Smith, Lawrence B, 1983. "The Price-Adjustment Process for Rental Housing and the Natural Vacancy Rate," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 73(4), pages 779-786, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Lerbs, Oliver & Teske, Markus, 2016. "The house price-vacancy curve," ZEW Discussion Papers 16-082, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.
    2. Molloy, Raven, 2016. "Long-term vacant housing in the United States," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 118-129.
    3. Masatomo Suzuki & Yasushi Asami, 2020. "Shrinking housing market, long-term vacancy, and withdrawal from housing market," Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science, Springer, vol. 4(3), pages 619-638, October.
    4. Carolin Fritzsche & Lars Vandrei, 2018. "Causes of Vacancies in the Housing Market – A Literature Review," ifo Working Paper Series 258, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich.
    5. Miceli, Thomas J. & Sirmans, C.F., 2013. "Efficiency rents: A new theory of the natural vacancy rate for rental housing," Journal of Housing Economics, Elsevier, vol. 22(1), pages 20-24.
    6. Jeffrey P. Cohen & Cletus C. Coughlin & Jonas C. Crews, 2018. "Interregional Migration and Housing Vacancy: Theory and Empirics," Working Papers 2018-007, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised 16 Oct 2020.
    7. Genesove, David & Han, Lu, 2012. "Search and matching in the housing market," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 72(1), pages 31-45.
    8. Han, Lu & Strange, William C., 2015. "The Microstructure of Housing Markets," Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, in: Gilles Duranton & J. V. Henderson & William C. Strange (ed.), Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, edition 1, volume 5, chapter 0, pages 813-886, Elsevier.
    9. Charles Ka Yui Leung & Joe Cho Yiu Ng, 2018. "Macro Aspects of Housing," GRU Working Paper Series GRU_2018_016, City University of Hong Kong, Department of Economics and Finance, Global Research Unit.
    10. Li-Min Hsueh & Hsi-Peng Tseng & Chang-Chiang Hsieh, 2007. "Relationship Between the Housing Vacancy Rate, Housing Price, and the Moving Rate at the Township Level in Taiwan, in 1990 and 2000," International Real Estate Review, Global Social Science Institute, vol. 10(1), pages 119-150.
    11. de Wit, Erik R. & Englund, Peter & Francke, Marc K., 2013. "Price and transaction volume in the Dutch housing market," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2), pages 220-241.
    12. Andrew Benito, 2006. "How does the down-payment constraint affect the UK housing market?," Bank of England working papers 294, Bank of England.
    13. Christian A. L. Hilber, 2019. "Immobilienpreise und Immobilienzyklen und die Rolle von Angebotsbeschränkungen [The impact of local supply constraints on house prices and price dynamics]," Zeitschrift für Immobilienökonomie (German Journal of Real Estate Research), Springer;Gesellschaft für Immobilienwirtschaftliche Forschung e. V., vol. 5(1), pages 37-65, November.
    14. Atif Mian & Amir Sufi & Francesco Trebbi, 2015. "Foreclosures, House Prices, and the Real Economy," Journal of Finance, American Finance Association, vol. 70(6), pages 2587-2634, December.
    15. Honglin Wang & Chu Zhang & Weihang Dai, 2013. "Rental Adjustment and Housing Prices: Evidence from Hong Kong's Residential Property Market," Working Papers 012013, Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.
    16. John P. Harding & Jing Li & Stuart S. Rosenthal & Xirui Zhang, 2022. "Forced moves and home maintenance: The amplifying effects of mortgage payment burden on underwater homeowners," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 50(2), pages 498-533, June.
    17. L. Rachel Ngai & Silvana Tenreyro, 2014. "Hot and Cold Seasons in the Housing Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(12), pages 3991-4026, December.
    18. Josep Maria Raya Vilchez & Aleksander Kucel, 2023. "How fiscal policy affects housing market dynamics: Evidence from Spain," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(2), pages 323-347, April.
    19. Suarez, Javier & Ceron, Jose A., 2006. "Hot and Cold Housing Markets: International Evidence," CEPR Discussion Papers 5411, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    20. Lynn M. Fisher & Lauren Lambie-Hanson & Paul Willen, 2015. "The Role of Proximity in Foreclosure Externalities: Evidence from Condominiums," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 7(1), pages 119-140, February.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Vacancy; excess housing supply;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:fip:fedgfe:2014-73. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Ryan Wolfslayer ; Keisha Fournillier (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbgvus.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.