North to south migration in the U.S. and housing developers’ claims of benefits led to exponential growth in neighbourhood homeowners associations during recent decades. Sanctioned by state laws, association rules governing homeowners are usually initiated by developers who claim that the rules protect property values. But the claim is not supported by empirical analysis. Inflation adjusted annual percentage returns in consecutive sales of a sample of 900 most recent home sales in Duval County Florida, Pima County Arizona and St. Louis County Missouri during late 2017 and early-2018 were examined. The results revealed that the annual percentage returns on homes sold in homeowners associations were significantly less than those of homes in other neighbourhoods statistically controlling for property characteristics and prevailing economic conditions at the time of the original purchase. Correlates of home prices at any point in time are not predictive of percentage return from purchase to sale.
Econometric models have produced contradictory results and have failed to provide warning of housing market crashes. The article aims to illustrate how econometrics was unable to reliably predict the recent housing price bubble and detect the disequilibrium in the housing markets. The authors will demonstrate that two distinct but well specified econometric models, using the same data, can lead to different outcomes. The authors argue that the demand for housing is influenced by social constructs, social norms, ideologies, unrealistic expectations, symbolic patterns, and that the actual choice of housing is the outcome of complex social interactions with reference groups. Consequently, it is necessary to analyse the potential instability of social constructs, norms, expectations and the changing character of social interactions to better understand purchasing behaviour and, then, housing price volatility.
This paper explores the effects of housing prices on income inequality in urban China. The authors use China's interprovincial panel data for the period between 1999 and 2011 and find that there is a significant positive association between housing prices and the Gini coefficient of the income of urban residents, and that there are remarkable regional disparities.