This paper uses a survey of over 2500 rental property owners in ten cities across the United States to determine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on landlords' rent collection and business behavior. Our findings show that yearly rent collection was down significantly in 2020 relative to 2019-both within and across rental markets-and that an increasing number of owners have a large share of their portfolio behind on rent. Small owners and owners of color faced the highest exposure to deep tenant arrears in 2020, challenges they were also more likely to face prior to pandemic. Our findings show that owner business practices changed dramatically in 2020, with a higher share of landlords granting tenants rent extensions or forgiving back rent during the pandemic relative to prior. However, many owners also disinvested in their rental properties through deferred maintenance, missed mortgage payments, and property sale listings. Landlords of color pursued disinvestment strategies during the pandemic at an elevated rate compared to white landlords. Owners of properties in neighborhoods with more non-white residents were both more likely to experience decreased rent collection and more likely to pursue evictions and rental late fees holding constant rental payment rates, implying the pandemic has disproportionately affected renters in communities of color. Overall, our findings highlight the strain the pandemic has placed on the housing stock, which has implications for the long-term viability and affordability of many of these units. More concerningly, our results show that households of color-which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic in other domains-were more likely to face punitive measures from landlords in both 2019 and 2020, suggesting the pandemic has exacerbated existing racial inequality in housing markets.

We exploit unique Norwegian day-by-day transaction and hour-by-hour bidding logs data in order to examine how market participants reacted to the spreading news of Covid-19 in early March 2020, the lockdown on March 12, and the re-opening on April 20. We observe changes on the date of the lockdown in transaction volumes, sell-prediction spreads, exploitative bidding behavior, and seller confidence. However, when we compare observed price developments with our estimated counter-factual price developments, we find that about half of the total fall in prices had already occurred before the lockdown was implemented. The re-opening completely reverses the lockdown effect on prices. We show that voluntary behavioral changes, as well as lockdown and re-opening effects, are visible in various measures of social mobility, and that changes in daily news sentiment correlate with the abnormal price movements during this period.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers initiated a forbearance program-that allowed borrowers to pause their mortgage payments-to prevent a large-scale foreclosure crisis. Using detailed loan-level performance data, we study forbearance take-up and subsequent performance among two distinct group of mortgage borrowers: single borrowers versus coborrowers. We provide stylized facts that compared to coborrowers, single borrowers have lower incomes, lower credit scores, higher loan-to-value ratios and higher debt-to-income ratios and are hence more financially vulnerable. We find that single borrowers are more apt to elect forbearance, all else constant. We further find that forbearance had a stronger positive effect on helping single borrowers avoid or recover and exit delinquency than coborrowers.

The COVID-19 pandemic induced an increase in both the amount of time that households spend at home and the share of expenditures allocated to at-home consumption. These changes coincided with a period of rapidly rising house prices. We interpret these facts as the result of stay-at-home shocks that increase demand for goods consumed at home as well as the homes that those goods are consumed in. We first test the hypothesis empirically using US cross-county panel data and instrumental variables regressions. We find that counties where households spent more time at home experienced faster increases in house prices. We then study various pandemic shocks using a heterogeneous agent model with general equilibrium in housing markets. Stay-at-home shocks explain around half of the increase in model house prices in 2020. Lower mortgage rates explain around one third of the price rise, while unemployment shocks and fiscal stimulus have relatively small effects on house prices. We find that young households and first-time home buyers account for much of the increase in housing demand during the pandemic, but they are largely crowded out of the housing market by the equilibrium rise in house prices.

I use daily and weekly data from 100 metropolitan areas in 2020 to investigate the effects of state-level policies to combat the COVID-19 pandemic on various indicators of U.S. housing market activity. Measures of housing market activity include change in new listings, total inventory, newly pending sales, median list price, web traffic to for-sale homes, and average number of days to pending sale status. Using event study and difference-in-differences models, I find that the closure of non-essential businesses in certain states was associated with up to an 11-percentage point decrease in new home listings and a 3.5 percentage point decrease in total inventory relative to the same period in 2019. I also find that school closures may affect some outcomes.

Recent research interest has focused on the impact of the room sharing business model on housing markets. However, existing empirical evidence is limited and exclusively focuses on few large cities in the U.S. This study examines the effects of Airbnb on housing rental and sales prices using a unique large-scale dataset comprised of housing market transaction records and the number of Airbnb listings drawn from their website in Taiwan. We estimate a fixed effect model of housing rental and sales price equations and find that a one-standard deviation increase in the number of Airbnb listings raises house rental prices by 0.38%. This finding suggests that a substitution effect is present between Airbnb's short-term accommodation and the housing rental market. Moreover, a larger effect on rental price is found among Airbnb listings that offer an entire room or apartment. Additionally, since September 2017, multinational digital platform companies must comply with a new sales tax policy in Taiwan. We evaluate the effect of this tax policy using the difference-in-difference method and find a negative impact on the number of Airbnb listings and housing rental prices after its implementation. This study is the first to empirically assess the effectiveness of tax policy on regulating room sharing business models.

The durability of the real estate capital stock could hinder climate change adaptation because past construction anchors the population in beautiful and productive but increasingly-risky coastal areas. However, coastal developers anticipate that their assets face increasing risk and this creates an incentive to seek adaptation strategies. This paper models climate change as a joint process of (1) increasingly destructive storms and (2) a risk of sea-level rise that submerges coastal property. We study how forward-looking developers and real estate investors respond to the new risks along a number of dimensions including their choices of location, capital durability, capital mobility (modular real estate), and maintenance of existing properties. The net effect of such investments is a more resilient urban population.

This study evaluates the community impact of the first four years of Homebase, a homelessness prevention program in New York City. Family shelter entries decreased on average in the neighborhoods in which Homebase was operating. Homebase effects appear to be heterogeneous, and so different kinds of averages imply different-sized effects. The (geometric) average decrease in shelter entries was about 5% when census tracts are weighted equally, and 11% when community districts (which are much larger) are weighted equally. This study also examines the effect of foreclosures. Foreclosures are associated with more shelter entries in neighborhoods that usually do not send large numbers of families to the shelter system.

Homelessness prevention programs intervene with households apparently in imminent danger of becoming homeless, and try to keep them housed. If they are at least partially successful, how do they change the average shelter spell of households actually becoming homeless? We use data from 2003 to 2008 for Homebase, a New York City homelessness prevention program that studies have found to be effective in reducing shelter entries. Homebase made no difference in average shelter spells at the community level. This result, like many results about shelter spell length, is not easy to reconcile with the idea that shelter spell length is a reflection of the seriousness of underlying problems.

Most single adults share housing with other adults, and living alone is considerably more expensive than living with someone else. Yet policies that discourage shared housing for formerly homeless people or people at risk of becoming homeless are common, and those that encourage it are rare. This would be understandable if such housing adversely affected its users in some way. We ask whether shared housing produces adverse effects. Our provisional answer is no. For the most part, whether a person lives alone or shares housing seems to make no difference to the outcomes we studied although shared housing is associated with reduced psychotic symptomology. We use data from ACCESS, a 5-year, 18-site demonstration project with over 6,000 formerly homeless individuals as participants.