Sven Damen

Wil je baanbrekend onderzoek combineren met beleidsrelevante inzichten? Wij zijn op zoek naar een voltijdse doctoraatsbursaal in woningmarkteconomie aan @uantwerpen.be

Solliciteren kan tot 26 februari 2026 www.uantwerpen.be/nl/jobs/vaca...

The results suggest that well-designed, early-stage risk disclosure works! Especially when risks are less visible or for socioeconomically vulnerable households.

Link to the paper: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... (5/5)

We find stronger price declines in disadvantaged neighborhoods with below-median income, education or above-median unemployment. In addition, fewer buyers from disadvantaged neighborhoods purchase homes in medium-risk areas after the disclosure. (4/5)

Using DiD and Diff-in-Disc analyses, we find that house prices fall by 4% in medium-risk zones after disclosure. In high-risk areas, effects are concentrated at flood-risk boundaries, indicating risk was already priced deep inside high-risk areas, but not near the edges (3/5)

Although flood maps were publicly accessible in Flanders (Belgium) prior to the reform, the policy ensured that risk information was prominently displayed in listing advertisements, making it salient early in the home-buying process (2/5)

How does early disclosure of flood risk affect housing prices and who buys risky homes?
In a new paper, we study a reform that required flood risk to be displayed directly in real estate listings, indicating whether a property lies in a high- or medium flood risk area (1/5)

Housing market responses to the mortgage interest deduction This paper examines the impact of tax subsidies for homeowners on the housing market. In 2015, the Belgian regions became responsible for the tax subs…

Happy to see this paper published in RSUE. @damensven.bsky.social and I find that subsidies for homeowners largely capitalize in house and land prices, but do not significantly affect sales of existing houses and undeveloped land, nor permits for new houses. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Rental housing returns are highest for low-rent housing, after risk adjustment. Financing, informational, and reputational frictions prevent enough capital inflow in this segment, from Sven Damen, Matthijs Korevaar, and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh https://www.nber.org/papers/w33470

Paper is here: papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

Comments are welcome!

What to do if you are an investor? Consider reallocating more capital to the low-rent segment.

What if you are a policymaker? Stimulate the flow of (private or public) capital into this segment.

* and low-income renters cannot afford to buy their property (even if it were for sale)

We see strong market segmentation: low-rent properties in NL & BE are owned by unincorporated (P) landlords with 10-50 properties. Corporate investors (B) invest in high-end rentals instead.

We favor a limits to arbitrage explanation:
* large landlords don't want to enter this space for reputational reasons and maybe diseconomies of scale
* smaller landlords have strong local bias and face binding equity capital constraints that prevent them to scale up

Idiosyncratic risk also cannot explain it. There doesn't seem to be enough idiosyncratic risk at the landlord portfolio level to generate the observed return premium (unless risk aversion were >250). No differential mortgage default risk either.

What about regulatory risk? Isn't there a high risk that future cash flows on low-rent properties could be regulated away? We build a new Renter Protection Index from US State laws with CatGPT. Find no evidence for this story. If anything, goes the wrong way.

One natural explanation for this could be risk. Maybe lower rent properties have cash flows that go down more in recessions? Not true, in fact the opposite happens. Affordable housing is an inferior good for households, a recession hedge for investors.

For BE and NL we break down costs by decile. Lower-rent housing is older and requires more maintenance/capex. Also has higher tenant turnover and credit loss, and higher property management fees. But none of that is enough to eliminate the slope in rents.

A lot of effort here into measurement. Belgium is one of the only countries in the world with a rent registry, where we see actual rent paid administratively. Very good data on rents in NL as well, and in the US we infer net rents (NOI) from mortgage contract terms for multi.

This is a one-picture paper. Net rental yields and capital gain yields are both declining in rent levels. Total housing returns are 1.7% (Belgium), 3.6% (NL), and 3.9% (US) higher per year for the lowest than for the highest decile of rents.

📣 New paper alert: An Alpha in Affordable Housing?

A collaboration with Matthijs Korevaar and Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

We show that low-rent/low-income housing earns the highest returns for landlords in the US, Belgium and The Netherlands.

Please share to convince my coauthors to join Bluesky :-)

Check out this starter pack with accounts related to the University of Antwerp (Belgium):
go.bsky.app/NQ9aNYZ

Very happy to see our paper on interest-only mortgages and house prices in the Journal of Urban Economics!

From 2003 to 2006, Danish house prices increased by 60 percent, in a robust regulatory design that limits housing speculation. This was a larger increase than in the US, Spain, or Ireland!

This session also marked the conclusion of our Real Estate Finance elective week. A heartfelt thanks to our Master of Finance students for their active engagement and to Antwerp Management School for hosting this elective.

Already looking forward to next year's edition!

A big thank you to Romeo Mercken (CEO of Quares Investment Services) for delivering an insightful guest lecture on investments in residential real estate and the current trends shaping the real estate market.

Zaterdag zal ik op Finance Avenue deelnemen aan het panel "Is een huis kopen nog betaalbaar?" samen met Adel Yahia (Managing Director van Immobel), Thomas Valkeniers (CEO van Living Stone) en moderator Lukas Vanackere (De Tijd)

Gratis inschrijven via www.tijd.be/finance-avenue

Thanks!