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Journal Article
Investing in Elm Street: What Happens When Firms Buy Up Houses?
Since the onset of the mortgage crisis in 2007, a much larger than normal share of single-family houses listed for sale in the U.S. each year has been purchased by institutional investors?Wall Street firms, real estate trusts, international funds, and so on. This phenomenon has been easing since 2013, but investor activity remains widespread and is particularly prevalent in high-foreclosure areas such as Las Vegas and Atlanta, where prices had soared during the housing bubble and, after the crash, severe house price downturns occurred. This trend is also growing in areas of the country where ...
Journal Article
The Burden of High Housing Costs
Five years after the official end of the recession, households are still reeling financially. Indeed, while September marked a milestone for the unemployment rate, which dropped below 6 percent for the first time in six years, the median household income at last measure was still languishing at its lowest level in nearly 20 years, after adjusting for inflation. At the same time, rents are rising. Fallout from the housing crisis has slowed the movement into homeownership and driven up the demand for rentals more quickly and sharply than the supply is growing, resulting in tight markets, higher ...
Journal Article
Comparing Two House-Price Booms
In this Economic Commentary, we compare characteristics of the 2000–2006 house-price boom that preceded the Great Recession to the house-price boom that began in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. These two episodes of high house-price growth have important differences, including the behavior of rental rates, the dynamics of housing supply and demand, and the state of the mortgage market. The absence of changes in fundamentals during the 2000s is consistent with the literature emphasizing house-price beliefs during this prior episode. In contrast to during the 2000s boom, changes in ...