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The paper examines the risk-and-return characteristics of a popular development strategy, the presale system (or sale before completion), used in many Asian cities. We model a presale decision in a real-options framework and suggest that the use of presale is primarily for a risk-sharing purpose. That is, developers can reduce bankruptcy and marketing risks by selling (or leasing) their projects before their completion dates. Our model also indicates that, because of the presale system, there is a barrier for new developers to enter into a market, which helps explain the anecdotal observation that most real estate markets in Asian cities are oligopolistic in nature and dominated by large developers. Copyright 2004 by the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association

This paper studies U.S. house prices across 45 metropolitan areas from 1980 to 2012. It applies a version of the Gordon dividend discount model for long-run "fundamentals" and uses Mean Group and Pooled Mean Group estimation to estimate long-run and short-run determinants of house prices. We find great similarity across cities in that the long-run house prices are largely explained by the same fundamentals; the long-run rent to price ratio is approximately 5% plus 0.75 times the real interest rate (which is on the order of 2%). However, adjustments to deviations from the fundamentals are slow, in the long-run, closing the gap at a rate of around 10% per year. We find sharp differences in shortrun adjustments (momentum) away from the fundamentals across cities, and the differences are correlated with local supply elasticities (more momentum with lower elasticity). Analysis of residuals suggests strong cyclical deviations, which are mean-reverting.

This article analyzes the bubble in property values across cities in the United States from 1999 through 2005. We find evidence of momentum in house price growth (relative to growth in rents) away from the underlying fundamentals throughout the 1980–2005 period; however, momentum increased after 1999. We find that the bubble happened mostly after 2003; it was for a relatively short period and was characterized by a series of positive, seemingly random, shocks that were associated with the surge in the subprime market and the decline in short-term interest rates. Before that price changes were reasonably well explained by the fundamentals, particularly the decline in long‐term interest rates in the early part of the bubble period. We do not find evidence of a tendency for prices relative to rents to revert to a long‐run trend.

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