House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from the U.S. Listings Data

Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response. We exploit information contained in listings for the residential properties for sale in the Uni...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEc
Main Authors Gorea, Denis, Kryvtsov, Oleksiy, Kudlyak, Marianna
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis 05.08.2022
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Summary:Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response. We exploit information contained in listings for the residential properties for sale in the United States between 2001 and 2019 from the CoreLogic Multiple Listing Service Dataset. Using high-frequency measures of monetary policy shocks, we document that a one standard-deviation contractionary monetary policy surprise lowers housing list prices by 0.2–0.3 percent within two weeks—a magnitude on par with the effect on stock prices. House prices respond stronger to the surprises to future rates as compared to the surprise changes in the federal funds rate. Sale prices are mostly pre-determined by list prices and do not independently respond to monetary policy surprises.
DOI:10.24148/wp2022-16