Foreclosure Sales Through the Eyes of Real Estate Agents in Boston: An Institutional Ethnography

Author: Hannah Thomas

Dissertation School: Brandeis University

Abstract:

After the credit market deregulation of the late 1980s, Wall Street increasingly became a major investor in mortgages providing liquidity to the growing subprime mortgage market, introducing new stakeholders and reconfiguring existing housing market stakeholders. The fallout from the resulting minimally regulated surge in mortgage lending (that is, the current foreclosure crisis), continues to impact and destabilize neighborhoods across the country, disproportionately hitting communities of color (Reid 2009). Policymakers are responding in a variety of ways, including proposing a reconfiguration of the housing finance system. But we have limited data about the contemporary set of housing market stakeholders, their social relations and the implications for policy. This lack of information will likely limit the effectiveness of policymakers' attempts at restructuring the housing market. Additionally, there are no comprehensive studies of the foreclosure sales process that could help policymakers in their responses to short term needs for neighborhood stabilization.

Focused on revealing the policy-relevant social relations of stakeholders in the housing market, this dissertation will examine through the experiences of real estate agents the process of residential foreclosure sales. Real estate agents sit at a critical juncture in the housing market, bringing together many different stakeholders and mediating the social relations, rules and networks of different institutions offering a prime entry point for observing this market. By examining foreclosure sales and purchases, we have real potential to gain insight in understanding the social relations and interactions involved in the current foreclosure crisis that are both enabling and blocking progress in responding to concentrated foreclosures, so policymakers can address short-term implications for community recovery and stability. While foreclosure sales differ from normal residential sales, they do reveal important insights into the broader contemporary structure of the housing market offering the means to consider longer-term policy implications such as restructuring of the organizations and social relations comprising the housing market.

The research questions are: (1) By examining real estate agents' work in the residential foreclosure sales market, what do we learn about the social relations of the housing market; and (2) What role do real estate agents play in mediating housing market stakeholders in residential foreclosure sales?

To answer these questions I am conducting an institutional ethnography of residential foreclosure sales in Boston. Institutional ethnographies start from the perspective of an actor (for example, the real estate agent), and expand outwards attempting to understand the social relations of the institution (housing market) under study. Data sources will be varied and will include: interviews with real estate agents, and other stakeholders (for example, foreclosure auctioneers, city leaders), observation of real estate agents during the course of their work, interviews with homebuyers, observation of buyers (homebuyers and investors) through the process of purchasing a property, spatial analysis of open houses and sales data, participant observation at real estate agent's trainings, and observation at open houses, foreclosure auctions and other public locations where foreclosure properties are sold.

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