House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from the U.S. Listings Data
Denis Gorea, Oleksiy Kryvtsov and Marianna Kudlyak. First draft: February 2019.
Abstract: 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 estimate 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.
Paper in Working Paper series: FRBSF, Bank of Canada, Hoover Institution, IZA, SSRN, CEPR