The 1989-92 Credit Crunch for Real Estate : A Retrospective

This study assembles and assesses a broad range of evidence about the degree to which a quot;credit crunchquot; decreased real estate lending and construction activity in the 1989-92 period. It weighs the relative importance of the credit crunch and other factors that contributed to the falloff in real estate lending. Our primary objective is to provide a historical record that may help analysts interpret market developments the next time real estate markets turn down. Accordingly, we catalog the statistical evidence and examine hypotheses about the credit crunch but do not undertake rigorous statistical tests