Long-term vacant housing in the United States

Abstract

Because housing is durable, the housing supply is slow to adapt to declines in demand. This paper uses long-term vacancy-defined as nonseasonal housing units that have been vacant for an unusually long period of time-to quantify the extent of excess supply in the housing market. I find that long-term vacancy is less than 2 percent of all nonseasonal housing units and accounts for only one quarter of the aggregate increase in nonseasonal vacancy from 2001 to 2011. Thus, at the national level, excess supply is considerably less extensive than indicated by traditional measures of vacancy. However, the stock of long-term vacant housing is concentrated in a small number of neighborhoods that do have appreciably high long-term vacancy rates. Some of these neighborhoods have characteristics suggesting that excess supply is related to overbuilding during the housing boom, while others have characteristics that are symptomatic of persistently weak housing demand.

Analysis of the Dynamic Relationship between Fluctuations in the Korean Housing Market and the Occurrence of Unsold New Housing Stocks

“…Molloy (2016) presented a simple theoretical framework to illustrate the connection between vacancy and excess supply in the housing market, and discussed why data on duration of vacancy could help refine estimates of the excess supply. This study showed that the long-term vacancy rate was more strongly correlated with various measures of housing market distress than standard measures of vacancy, such as the gross vacancy rate or the home owner vacancy rate [16]. However, the literature is not sufficient to prove why houses remain unsold considering the Korean chonsei market.…”

Unused private and public buildings: Re-discussing merely empty and truly abandoned situations, with particular reference to the case of Italy and the city of Milan

“…There is much debate today on the problem of unused buildings, both in Europe (e.g., Couch & Cocks, 2013;Gentili & Hoekstra, 2018;Glock & Häussermann, 2004;Henderson, 2015;Micelli & Pellegrini, 2019;Németh & Langhorst, 2014) and in the United States (e.g., Accordino & Johnson, 2000;Cohen, 2001;Immergluck, 2016;Molloy, 2016;Silverman et al, 2013;Wang & Immergluck, 2018). This debate is often conducted in alarmed and concerned tones (as highlighted by Bennett, 2017).…”

Spatial Identification of Housing Vacancy in China

“…An indicator of HVR is often used by countries in the West as a weathervane to indicate the state of supply and demand in the real estate market (Ortalo-Magné and Rady, 2006); it is regarded as one of the main bases for real estate regulation and control (Vakili-Zad and Hoekstra, 2011). Academic research on housing vacancy on the West is also systematic, covering the concept of housing vacancy (Couch and Cocks, 2013;Molloy, 2016), vacancy rate calculation, and relationships such as those between housing vacancy and socio-economic indicators or between the real estate market and vacancy rate (Gentili and Hoekstra, 2019). Topics of research include newly-built housing as well as the existing housing stock; the theoretical and computational models are mature, and data are transparent (Wood et al, 2006).…”