Real Estate & Planning Research Seminar, online presentation by Associate Prof. Adrian Lee from the Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Melbourne "Who Gains from Housing Market Stimulus? Evidence from Housing Assistance Grants with Threshold Price"

If you would like to attend this Seminar please contact our Department Office at repschooloffice@reading.ac.uk for further details, giving your name and organisation/company details

Abstract

Who Gains from Housing Market Stimulus? Evidence from Housing Assistance Grants with Threshold Prices

Associate Prof. Adrian Lee, Property & Real Estate Discipline-Group Leader, Department of Finance, Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Melbourne.

This paper examines market implications of a housing assistance policy offering subsidies to buyers of new homes priced up to $600,000 in Sydney. We find this policy causes a large degree of sales bunching just below $600,000, over 8 times the counterfactual density. Policy affected homes are associated with 50% shorter time-on-market, 25% smaller area size, 57% higher chance of becoming rental properties in the long term, and especially an overpricing of $4,800, offsetting up to 86% of received benefit. Overpricing is aggravated by opportunistic developers that strategically shift their focus to policy eligible homes. This study sheds light on the effectiveness and externalities of housing subsidies to improve homeownership.

Bio

Associate Professor Adrian Lee is a real estate researcher specialising in uncovering and utilising unconventional disaggregated data sources for real estate valuation. He was an expert witness to the 2014 Australian Federal Government’s inquiry into foreign investors in residential real estate. He has won several competitive research grants in real estate and his research on residential real estate has been published in top academic journals such as Management Science and Real Estate Economics. He has featured extensively in the media including in the Washington Post, BBC, Sina.com.cn and the Australian Financial Review.