Momentum in Residential Real Estate

This paper examines whether there is return momentum in residential real estate in the U.S. Case and Shiller (American economic review 79(1):128-137, 1989) document evidence of positive return correlation in four U.S. cities. Similar to Jegadeesh and Titman's (Journal of finance 56:699-720, 1993) stock market momentum paper, we construct long-short zero cost investment portfolios from more than 380 metropolitan areas based on their lagged returns. Our results show that momentum of returns in the U.S. residential housing is statistically significant and economically meaningful during our 1983 to 2008 sample period. On average, zero cost investment portfolios that buy past winning housing markets and short sell past losing markets earn up to 8.92% annually. Our results are robust to different sub-periods and more pronounced in the Northeast and West regions. While zero cost portfolios of residential real estate indices is not a tradable strategy, the implications of our results can be useful for builders, potential home owners, mortgage originators and traders of real estate options.