IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fednsr/514.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Real estate investors, the leverage cycle, and the housing market crisis

Author

Abstract

We explore a mostly undocumented but important dimension of the housing market crisis: the role played by real estate investors. Using unique credit-report data, we document large increases in the share of purchases, and subsequently delinquencies, by real estate investors. In states that experienced the largest housing booms and busts, at the peak of the market almost half of purchase mortgage originations were associated with investors. In part by apparently misreporting their intentions to occupy the property, investors took on more leverage, contributing to higher rates of default. Our findings have important implications for policies designed to address the consequences and recurrence of housing market bubbles.

Suggested Citation

  • Andrew F. Haughwout & Donghoon Lee & Joseph Tracy & Wilbert Van der Klaauw, 2011. "Real estate investors, the leverage cycle, and the housing market crisis," Staff Reports 514, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fednsr:514
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr514.html
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr514.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Rajashri Chakrabarti & Donghoon Lee & Wilbert van der Klaauw & Basit Zafar, 2013. "Household Debt and Saving during the 2007 Recession," NBER Chapters, in: Measuring Wealth and Financial Intermediation and Their Links to the Real Economy, pages 273-322, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    2. Patric H. Hendershott & Joel Slemrod, 1982. "Taxes and the User Cost of Capital for Owner‐Occupied Housing," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 10(4), pages 375-393, December.
    3. Edward L. Glaeser & Joshua D. Gottlieb & Joseph Gyourko, 2012. "Can Cheap Credit Explain the Housing Boom?," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 301-359, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Karl E. Case & Robert J. Shiller, 1988. "The behavior of home buyers in boom and post-boom markets," New England Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, issue Nov, pages 29-46.
    5. John Geanakoplos & Ana Fostel, 2008. "Leverage Cycles and the Anxious Economy," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(4), pages 1211-1244, September.
    6. Haughwout, Andrew & Peach, Richard & Tracy, Joseph, 2008. "Juvenile delinquent mortgages: Bad credit or bad economy?," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 246-257, September.
    7. Patrick Bayer & Christopher Geissler & Kyle Mangum & James W Roberts & Andrew Karolyi, 2020. "Speculators and Middlemen: The Strategy and Performance of Investors in the Housing Market," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 33(11), pages 5212-5247.
    8. Charles Himmelberg & Christopher Mayer & Todd Sinai, 2005. "Assessing High House Prices: Bubbles, Fundamentals and Misperceptions," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 19(4), pages 67-92, Fall.
    9. Glaeser, Edward L. & Gyourko, Joseph & Saiz, Albert, 2008. "Housing supply and housing bubbles," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(2), pages 198-217, September.
    10. James M. Poterba, 1984. "Tax Subsidies to Owner-Occupied Housing: An Asset-Market Approach," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 99(4), pages 729-752.
    11. John Geanakoplos, 2010. "Solving the present crisis and managing the leverage cycle," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, vol. 16(Aug), pages 101-131.
    12. Sean D. Campbell & Morris A. Davis & Joshua H. Gallin & Robert F. Martin, 2006. "A trend and variance decomposition of the rent-price ratio in housing markets," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2006-29, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.).
    13. Donghoon Lee & Wilbert Van der Klaauw, 2010. "An introduction to the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel," Staff Reports 479, Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
    14. John Geanakoplos, 2009. "The Leverage Cycle," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1715, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    15. John Geanakoplos, 2010. "Solving the Present Crisis and Managing the Leverage Cycle," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1751, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    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. Magill, Michael & Quinzii, Martine, 2015. "Prices and investment with collateral and default," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 51(C), pages 111-132.
    2. Ashvin Ahuja & Lillian Cheung & Gaofeng Han & Nathan Porter & Wenlang Zhang, 2010. "Are House Prices Rising Too Fast in China?," Working Papers 1008, Hong Kong Monetary Authority.
    3. LAI, Ping-fu (Brian) & CHAN, Ho Sum, 2014. "The Imminent Housing Collapse - Will History Repeat Itself?," Studii Financiare (Financial Studies), Centre of Financial and Monetary Research "Victor Slavescu", vol. 18(4), pages 63-104.
    4. Ashvin Ahuja & Lillian Cheung & Gaofeng Han & Nathan Porter & Wenlang Zhang, 2011. "Are Housing Prices Rising Too Fast in China?," Working Papers id:3646, eSocialSciences.
    5. Man Cho, 2014. "Housing price and mortgage credit cycles: tales of two countries," Chapters, in: Susan Wachter & Man Cho & Moon Joong Tcha (ed.), The Global Financial Crisis and Housing, chapter 5, pages 82-111, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    6. Istiak, Khandokar & Serletis, Apostolos, 2020. "Risk, uncertainty, and leverage," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 91(C), pages 257-273.
    7. Todd Sinai, 2012. "House Price Moments in Boom-Bust Cycles," NBER Chapters, in: Housing and the Financial Crisis, pages 19-68, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Fostel, Ana & Geanakoplos, John, 2012. "Why does bad news increase volatility and decrease leverage?," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 147(2), pages 501-525.
    9. Chan, Sewin & Haughwout, Andrew & Tracy, Joseph, 2015. "How Mortgage Finance Affects the Urban Landscape," 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 987-1045, Elsevier.
    10. Aymanns, Christoph & Caccioli, Fabio & Farmer, J. Doyne & Tan, Vincent W.C., 2016. "Taming the Basel leverage cycle," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 263-277.
    11. Edward L. Glaeser, 2013. "A Nation Of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation And American History," NBER Working Papers 18825, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Matthew Jaremski & David C. Wheelock, 2020. "Banking on the Boom, Tripped by the Bust: Banks and the World War I Agricultural Price Shock," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(7), pages 1719-1754, October.
    13. Pascal Towbin & Mr. Sebastian Weber, 2015. "Price Expectations and the U.S. Housing Boom," IMF Working Papers 2015/182, International Monetary Fund.
    14. Levitin, Adam & Wachter, Susan, 2012. "Explaining the Housing Bubble," MPRA Paper 41920, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Poledna, Sebastian & Molina-Borboa, José Luis & Martínez-Jaramillo, Serafín & van der Leij, Marco & Thurner, Stefan, 2015. "The multi-layer network nature of systemic risk and its implications for the costs of financial crises," Journal of Financial Stability, Elsevier, vol. 20(C), pages 70-81.
    16. Greg Howard & Jack Liebersohn, 2023. "Regional Divergence and House Prices," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 49, pages 312-350, July.
    17. Edward L. Glaeser, 2013. "A Nation of Gamblers: Real Estate Speculation and American History," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(3), pages 1-42, May.
    18. Andrea Ferrero, 2015. "House Price Booms, Current Account Deficits, and Low Interest Rates," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 47(S1), pages 261-293, March.
    19. Ricardo J. Caballero, 2010. "Macroeconomics after the Crisis: Time to Deal with the Pretense-of-Knowledge Syndrome," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 24(4), pages 85-102, Fall.
    20. Bhardwaj, Geetesh & Sengupta, Rajdeep, 2014. "Subprime cohorts and loan performance," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 236-252.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Mortgages; real estate investments; Financial leverage;
    All these keywords.

    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:fednsr:514. 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: Gabriella Bucciarelli (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbnyus.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.