In 2013 buy-to-rent investors — referred to as buy-to-let (BTL) in the United Kingdom — accounted for 13% of all UK mortgage-funded housing transactions and for an even greater fraction of non-mortgage sales. This paper studies the behaviour of BTL investors using 2009-14 micro data....

We present new evidence that lenders use down payment size to price unobservable borrower risk. We exploit the contractual features of a UK scheme that helps home buyers top up their down payments with equity loans. We find that a 20 percentage point smaller down payment is associated with a 22...

Using data on the universe of housing transactions in England and Wales over a 20-year period, we document a robust pattern of history dependence in housing markets. Sale prices and selling propensities are affected by house prices prevailing in the period in which properties were previously...

We propose a framework for addressing the ‘black box' problem present in some Machine Learning (ML) applications. We implement our approach by using the Quantitative Input Influence (QII) method of Datta et al (2016) in a real‑world example: a ML model to predict mortgage defaults. This...

Academics have proposed hybrid products with equity features for the financing of housing. In spite of their risk-sharing benefits these products have not become mainstream. This paper studies an important exception, a UK government scheme which in the five years since its inception has provided...

At its November 2017 meeting, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted to increase Bank Rate for the first time since July 2007. The September 2017 NMG Consulting survey of households, whose results were shown to the MPC prior to their November policy decision, sheds light on...

This paper analyzes the duration of house price upturns and downturns in the last 40 years for 19 OECD countries. I provide two sets of results, one pertaining to the average length and the other to the length distribution. On average, upturns are longer than downturns, but the difference...

I analyze a real estate agency's proprietary dataset containing tens of thousands of housing sale and rental transactions in Central London during the 2006-2012 period. I isolate 1,922 properties which were both sold and rented out within a six-month period and measure their rent-price ratios. I...