Interest Rates, Local Housing Markets and House Price Over-reactions

Understanding the effects of interest rates on city-specific house price to household income ratios is important for managing local housing markets. In particular, there is concern that keeping interest rates at sufficiently low levels can distort the relationship between local house prices and fundamentals. We use house price to income ratios across capital cities in Australia to investigate this issue and show that there is a national interest rate transition' point below which housing dynamics can become unstable. This result lends support to the presence of a duration-dependent threshold effect (hitherto mainly explored in theoretical models).