How house prices respond to interest rates depends on where they are in the country

Danny Walker

Many people expect the rise in interest rates over the past 18 months to lead house prices to fall. Average prices have already fallen by 1–2% in the UK and by more in the US. In this post I show that historically there have been large differences in how an interest rate shock affects prices in different areas of the country, even though interest rates are determined nationally. House prices respond more to interest rates in areas with more restrictive housing supply, like London and the South East of England. These are also the areas where price growth has been strongest in recent decades.

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Monetary policy and US housing expansions: what can we expect for the post-COVID-19 housing recovery?

Bruno Albuquerque, Martin Iseringhausen and Frédéric Opitz

The fall in aggregate demand due to the COVID-19 shock has brought the eight-year long US housing market expansion to a halt. At the same time, the Federal Reserve and the US Government have deployed significant resources to support households and businesses. These actions should help weather the ongoing crisis and lay the seeds for the next recovery. It is, however, highly uncertain how the post-COVID-19 housing recovery will look. Using a time-varying parameter (TVP) model on US aggregate data, our results suggest that the next housing recovery may exhibit similar features to the 2012-19 expansion: a sluggish response of housebuilding to rising demand, but a strong response of house prices.

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