We construct rent-price ratios for houses and units in 82 local government areas in the Sydney and Melbourne markets for the period 1985/86-2015. Using this annual data we employ long-horizon regression techniques and find that rent-price ratios (i.e. rental yields) have predictive content for...

We conduct a comprehensive international study of predictability in housing markets using the rent-price ratio as a predictive variable. On data from 18 OECD countries we generally find return predictability in accordance with time-varying risk-premia, but we also document two puzzles. First,...

On the 22nd of February 2011, much of the residential housing stock in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, was damaged by an unusually destructive earthquake. Almost all of the houses were insured. We ask whether insurance was able to mitigate the damage adequately, or whether the damage from...

We augment linear pricing models for the housing market commonly used in the literature with google trends data in order to assess whether or not crowd-sourced search query data can improve the forecasting ability of the models. We compare various performance measures of the augmented linear...

This chapter reviews the evidence of predictability in US residential and commercial real estate markets. First, we highlight the main methodologies used in the construction of real estate indices, their underlying assumptions and their impact on the stochastic properties of the resultant...

This paper provides out-of-sample forecasts of linear and non-linear models of US and Census regions housing prices. The forecasts include the traditional point forecasts, but also include interval and density forecasts of the housing price distributions. The non-linear smooth-transition...