Households must decide on the choice of tenure: Should housing be purchased or rented? In North America, about two-thirds of households own their homes and this figure is increasing after a period of decline. Government and society encourage homeownership. It seems to have become accepted wisdom...

Home ownership increases the incentive to maintain property and neighborhood, as well as decreasing the outflow of rents from low-income zones. However, these benefits are not costless to homeowners. With a mortgage comes the possibility of default, the financial demands of maintenance, a...

African-Americans and Hispanics in Syracuse, New York, have lower homeownership rates than whites with comparable incomes, despite the availability of affordable housing. Using ethnographic methods, the study team examined home purchase by Hispanics and African-Americans as a multiphase process....

We use city-level data to analyze the relationship between homeowner borrowing patterns and house-price dynamics. Our principal finding is that in cities where a greater fraction of homeowners are highly leveraged--i.e., have high loan-to-value ratios--house prices react more sensitively to...

Loss mitigation is the process by which lenders attempt to minimize losses associated with foreclosure. As competition increases in the mortgage industry, lenders and servicers are under great pressure to adopt loss mitigation tactics rather than simply use foreclosure as the means of dealing...

Although crime rates have long been thought to influence residential housing prices, no previous study has measured the effect of crime rates on rates of default on residential mortgages. Using a standard model of default in which crime rates can affect both the value of property and the...

This paper presents a first step towards a new theory of housing market fluctuations. We develop a life-cycle model where agents face credit constraints and their housing consumption is restricted to a discrete set of possibilities. The market interaction of young credit constrained agents...

Appreciation of prices in the housing market is analysed in this paper with different statistical tests. Using Ljung-Box test statistics for monthly data for a sample that starts in the beginning of 1981 and ends in the mid 1993 the EMH, efficient market hypothesis is rejected for nominal and...

This paper studies structural adequacy and crowding as dimensions of housing quality. American Housing Survey of Metropolitan Areas data for seven metropolitan areas, Atlanta (Georgia), Baltimore (Maryland), New York (New York), St. Louis (Missouri), San Diego(California), Seattle (Washington),...