IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedpwp/19-1.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Leaving Households Behind: Institutional Investors and the U.S. Housing Recovery

Author

Listed:
  • Lauren Lambie-Hanson
  • Wenli Li
  • Michael Slonkosky

Abstract

Ten years after the mortgage crisis, the U.S. housing market has rebounded significantly with house prices now near the peak achieved during the boom. Homeownership rates, on the other hand, have continued to decline. We reconcile the two phenomena by documenting the rising presence of institutional investors in this market. Our analysis makes use of housing transaction data. By exploiting heterogeneity in zip codes' exposure to the First Look program instituted by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that affected investors' access to foreclosed properties, we establish the causal relationship between the increasing presence of institutions in the housing market and the subsequent recovery in house prices and decline in homeownership rates between 2007 and 2014. We further demonstrate that institutional investors contributed to the improvement in the local labor market by reducing overall unemployment rate and by increasing total employment, construction employment in particular. Local housing rents also rose.

Suggested Citation

  • Lauren Lambie-Hanson & Wenli Li & Michael Slonkosky, 2019. "Leaving Households Behind: Institutional Investors and the U.S. Housing Recovery," Working Papers 19-1, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedpwp:19-1
    DOI: 10.21799/frbp.wp.2019.01
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.philadelphiafed.org/-/media/frbp/assets/working-papers/2019/wp19-01.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.21799/frbp.wp.2019.01?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Muñoz, Manuel A., 2020. "Macroprudential policy and the role of institutional investors in housing markets," Working Paper Series 2454, European Central Bank.
    2. Michael J. Seiler & Liuming Yang, 2023. "The burgeoning role of iBuyers in the housing market," Real Estate Economics, American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association, vol. 51(3), pages 721-753, May.
    3. Carlos Garriga & Athena Tsouderou & Pedro Gete, 2019. "Housing Dynamics without Homeowners. The Role of I," 2019 Meeting Papers 1407, Society for Economic Dynamics.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    housing; homeownership; mortgage crises;
    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:fedpwp:19-1. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Beth Paul (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbphus.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.