Temporally Dynamic Externalities and Real Estate Liquidity

In this paper, we reexamine a known disamenity to glean new insights into neighborhood spillovers. Employing a survival analysis and a difference-in-difference framework, we find that registered sex offenders have a large adverse impact on nearby home liquidity on average; and, this effect is largely driven by “surprises” of their moving in or out during the marketing period of nearby homes. However, for homes near offenders who reside nearby through the entire marketing period, sellers tend to steeply discount the initial list price and may actually sell their homes more quickly. These cases ultimately lead to lower sale prices for nearby properties on average, while the sale price effects are nosier for the surprise or temporally dynamic cases, providing initial evidence that more dynamic externalities manifest primarily in the liquidity of nearby homes.