In theory, people who own real estate should have advantage finding a partner in the marriage market.
Empirical analyses along this line, however, face three issues.
First, it is difficult to identify any causality for whether housing facilitates marriage or expected marriage facilitates a housing purchase.
Second, survey samples usually do not cover very wealthy people, and so the observations are top coding in the wealth dimension.
Third, getting married is a dynamic life-cycle decision, and rich life-history data are rarely available.
This paper uses registry data from Taiwan to estimate the impact of males' housing wealth on their first-marriage duration, taking into account all three issues mentioned above.
The researchers found that a 10% increase in real estate wealth increases probability of a man getting married in any particular year by 3.92%.
Their finding suggests that housing or real estate is a status good in the marriage market.
Moreover, this housing wealth effect is over 6 times larger than the effect of financial assets in their robustness checks, suggesting the particular importance of housing wealth in the marriage decision.
The culture in Taiwan is different from the one in the Philippines but it gives the Filipino men some serious food for thought!
In case of emergency, contact your broker!
Source: PSA and ResearchGate