Abstract
We investigate whether US real estate developers display herding in their building permit seeking behavior. We measure herding over the period 1988 through 2011 by applying to permit issuances measures previously used in studies of stock herding. We find evidence of herding at levels comparable to those found in studies involving common-stock trading. Developer herding is also stronger in up markets, than in down markets. This is consistent with up market buoyancy constraining the availability of reliable, independent information, which reinforces the tendency to follow the behavior of others.
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Notes
“Anti-herding” is also reported in the financial literature. For example, Bernhardt et al. (2006) find that financial analysts issue contrarian forecasts that overshoot the consensus in the direction of private information.
Lai and Van Order (2010) are among those who document the speculative real estate bubble that occurred in the 2000s and was accompanied by overbuilding in many US regions.
Scheinkman and Xiong (2003) attempt to explain the occurrence of asset price bubbles from a perspective of heterogeneous beliefs and highlight that overconfidence might lead to these beliefs and in turn cause the bubbles. Xiong (2013) further addresses the important implication of heterogeneous beliefs for excessive financial leverage and investment. However, our study pays special attention to herding behavior, which can be viewed as a form of learning process and therefore is in opposition to overconfident behavior. Investors’ learning from each other actually might mitigate their heterogeneous beliefs in some cases. Xiong (2013) also notices and discusses similar behavioral effects.
Similar to DeCoster and Strange (2012), we assume that the two developers are homogenous, while they might receive informational signals with different qualities and choose differentiated development locations. The previous studies, such as Bikhchandani et al. (1992) and DeCoster and Strange (2012), emphasize that informational asymmetry and management’s reputation might matter in interpreting the behavior of herding or information cascade, which can be driven by investors’ rational, optimal investment decisions. This assumption facilitates identifying this class of mutual mimicking investment behavior.
Two-to-four unit residential homes are commonly known as duplexes, triplexes and quadriplexes. The larger units are generally considered to be multi-family residential (aka. apartments).
The Akaike information criterion (AIC) and the Final prediction error (FPE) criterion specify 6 lags to be included in the regressions. We verify these findings with the post-estimation Lagrange-multiplier Test (LM). The LM test conveys the condition of no serial correlation in the residuals with a larger lag order for some models. We report only 3 lags for the sake of brevity.
This is a repeat sales index taken from mortgage data provided by the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (FHLMC). It was first published in 1995 by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), but is updated and released currently by FHFA.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Man Cho, Steve Bourassa, Martin Hoesli, Steven Laposa, Erik Devos, Julian Diaz, Alan Ziobrowski, the journal editors, reviewers, for their helpful comments. We express gratitude to the members of the Asia Pacific Real Estate Research Symposium in Seoul, South Korea and members of the American Real Estate Society Annual Meeting in St. Petersburg Beach, Florida for their helpful insights. We are also appreciative of the United States Census Bureau for providing data utilized in this research.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
By Bayes’ Rule, since
we have
Appendix 2
By Bayes’ Rule, because
we have
Appendix 3
By Bayes’ Rule, because
we can obtain
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Ro, S., Gallimore, P., Clements, S. et al. Herding Behavior among Residential Developers. J Real Estate Finan Econ 59, 272–294 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-018-9675-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11146-018-9675-y