Search Ripples in Housing Markets: Quality, Location, and the Housing Cycle

This article investigates housing-market search intensity as a measure of within-city market tightness. We use novel transaction-level auction data that distinguish two stages of observed search participation, registered interest and bidding. In line with a stylized model of segmented housing search, we find that search intensity varies systematically across quality tiers. During boom periods, search intensity is relatively higher for lower-quality dwellings. During bust periods, this gradient weakens and partly reverses toward higher qualitydwellings. Asking prices are more strongly negatively associated with bidding than with registered interest, consistent with bidding representing a later stage of participation. Quality-specific search intensity is also associated with price growth in the expected direction, and dynamic analyses suggest that changes in search intensity tend to precede changes in prices. These findings point to search intensity as an early indicator of market tightness and as a margin through which housing cycles may propagate across quality and location segments.