title: Mortgage Rate Lock-In and Housing Market Dynamics
slug: realestate
summary: Reproducible housing-finance research on how mortgage rate lock-in relates to mortgage exits, local activity, prices, and residential construction.
research_question: How does the gap between homeowners' existing mortgage rates and current market mortgage rates affect mortgage exits, housing-market activity, local prices, and new construction?
why_it_matters: Mortgage lock-in may reshape both housing supply and repeat-buyer demand, so credible analysis must separate measurable exposure from causal effects and preserve the distinction between mortgage exits, sales, and moves.
research_fields:
  - Housing economics
  - Mortgage finance
  - Applied econometrics
project_type: empirical-research
status: public-live
authors:
  - Repository owner and maintainer
original_source: RealEstate workspace project
original_sample_period: Registered Freddie Mac cohorts from 2013Q1 through 2022Q4, with public aggregate outcomes through their documented source periods.
updated_sample_period: The current public reports cover registered-data analyses completed on 2026-08-13; source-specific periods remain recorded in each artifact.
data_sources:
  - Freddie Mac Single-Family Loan-Level Dataset under registration and license; loan-level records are never redistributed
  - Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey
  - Federal Housing Finance Agency House Price Index
  - Home Mortgage Disclosure Act aggregations via the CFPB Data Browser
  - U.S. Census Building Permits Survey and BLS Local Area Unemployment Statistics
data_license: Registered Freddie Mac records and loan-level derivatives are excluded; public-source and synthetic materials retain source-specific terms documented in data/LICENSE_AND_REDISTRIBUTION.md.
code_license: MIT
reproduction_command: make reproduce-sample
expected_runtime: The synthetic vertical slice is suitable for public reproduction; the registered full run requires licensed data and substantial local compute.
outputs:
  - src/
  - reports/
  - tests/
  - dashboard/
  - data/fixtures/
  - docs/
github_url: https://github.com/YangXiaoShawn/YangXiaoShawn.github.io/tree/main/realestate
site_url: https://yangxiaoshawn.github.io/projects/realestate/
dataset_url: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ShawnChamberlain/open-economic-quant-research-data/tree/main/RealEstate
space_url: https://huggingface.co/spaces/ShawnChamberlain/open-economic-quant-research-observatory
last_updated: 2026-08-14
limitations: The loan-level outcome is prepayment, not a home sale or household move. Registered loan-level records and loan-granular derivatives are not redistributed. Loan-level estimates are associations; market-level causal language is allowed only where pre-trends and placebos pass.
catalog:
  field: housing
  accent: amber
  tags:
    - Housing Economics
    - Mortgage Lock-In
    - Event Studies
  metric: Tiered empirical evidence