Replication package: When a Deed Is Not a Market Sale: Foreclosure Transfers, Statutory Consideration, and Repeat-Sales House-Price Measurement

Abstract

Replication package and working paper for When a Deed Is Not a Market Sale: Foreclosure Transfers, Statutory Consideration, and Repeat-Sales House-Price Measurement, by Pablo Loschi (independent researcher, Berlin). When a lender takes title through a referee's foreclosure deed, a deed in lieu or a transfer between lenders, New York State and City transfer-tax rules can base the recorded consideration on a foreclosure judgment, a bid or outstanding debt. The amount then follows a legal rule, and the state and city calculations differ. The package identifies 16,655 such deed-family documents among 1.47 million recorded in Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens from 2003 to 2025. Standard screens keep many of them, and 94–95% of screened legal-rule deeds appear in the Department of Finance sales file at the recorded amount. In a Bailey–Muth–Nourse repeat-sales index of 1–3 family houses, dropping pairs with a lender take-title endpoint changes the quarterly index by up to 3.7 log points (95% CI 2.5–4.9). The cumulative peak-to-trough decline moves by only 0.6 log points in this sample and estimator, so the correction changes the timing of the decline more than its size. The largest quarterly difference is 10.9 log points for Bronx houses; for condominiums it is negligible. Files in this record: ACRIS_CONSIDERATION_v1.0.2.zip: code, classifier, manuscript (source, PDF and Word), tables, figures, documentation and the blind document-review sheets. The analyst key for the audit sample is withheld until the review is complete; its SHA-256 is in the README. ACRIS_CONSIDERATION_v1.0_DATA.zip: the frozen NYC Open Data pulls and the derived data. ACRIS_CONSIDERATION_v1.0.2_MANUSCRIPT.pdf: the manuscript on its own. revision_notes.md: changes between versions. The README explains how to reproduce the results from the frozen snapshot. Validation status: The numerical cross-check passed 102/102 for version 1.0.1, and version 1.0.2 changes no estimate. An independent reconstruction reproduced the headline index correction. Two independent human readers have not yet finished the 400-deed blind probability sample, so the classifier's precision and population recall are not yet known. In a non-random sample of deeds with foreclosure remarks, AI readings of buyer names give an indicative recall of 89–94%. This is not a population error rate or human validation. Source data are public NYC Open Data records; the included LICENSE gives the source-data terms. For details of changes between versions, see revision_notes.md.