Commercial real estate indices play an important role in performance evaluation and overall investment strategy. However, the issue of how representative they are of the returns on portfolios of commercial properties is an open issue. Our study addresses this topic by analyzing a sample of...

Hedonic property value models have been frequently used to value environmental amenities because markets for these goods usually do not exist. Typically, researchers cite Rosen's (1974) seminal work, which allows one to interpret functions of the hedonic regression coefficients as the marginal...

We examine the association between online apartment rental searches and fundamental real estate market variables namely, vacancy rates, rental rates and real estate asset price returns. We find the consumer real estate searches are significantly associated with the market fundamentals after...

Designation of historic properties and historic districts is increasingly used as a means to revive central city neighborhoods and to promote urban economic development. While preservation activities are thought to generate positive externalities for surrounding neighborhoods, these external...

There are significant disparities in homeownership rates across the regions and states of the US. The causes of these disparities are determined within a standard probit model of the individual homeownership decision where the micro-level observations are aggregated to the regional level....

The homeownership rates of Hispanic and Asian-American households are significantly less than those of some other demographic groups in the U.S., especially after accounting for income and other characteristics. This naturally leads to an investigation of the impact of immigration...

We simulate the effects of unseasonable increases in temperature and precipitation on housing starts and completions in each of the four Census regions. Using an over identified vector autoregression model the dynamics of housing starts and completions are estimated. The persistence of housing...

In mortgage debt contracts, real property serves as collateral and the terms of mortgage financing are largely conditional on the certification of collateral value by appraisers. However, overstatement of collateral value is common in the appraisal industry, causing troubles in the mortgage...

There is a debate whether the federal funds rate deviated from the Taylor rule. We present evidence that standard inflation measures do not reflect the contemporaneous state of housing rents, which is a large part of consumption. Using a new housing rent index (RRI) developed by Ambrose et al....

This paper demonstrates that inflation rates are significantly modified when they are based on an alternative quality-adjusted measure of housing rents constructed from a monthly statistic of landlord net rental income. During the Great Recession, the official rate was overestimated by 1.7 to...