When Discounts Fail to Clear: Price–Liquidity Divergence and Selective Shadow Costs in an Opaque Housing Market

A listing below a hedonic benchmark is usually interpreted as a concession. The signal becomes less clear when the same property also remains on the market for an unusually long period. This paper examines whether that combination—price–liquidity divergence—contains information about non-price housing burdens and about the buyers who enter such transactions. The analysis uses 430 completed purchases of self-built townhouses in Ho Chi Minh City, restricted to owner-occupiers, and matches listing histories and notarized transaction prices with property attributes, buyer characteristics, and assessments of commute, safety, noise, and odor. A transaction is flagged when its initial listing price is below the hedonic benchmark and its time on market is at or above the sample’s 70th percentile. Sixty-two transactions meet this definition. Lower-income and repeat buyers are substantially more likely to enter flagged transactions. The burden pattern is selective rather than general: safety and noise show recurring negative associations, while commute and odor do not. For low-income first-time buyers, the baseline safety difference is close to one sample standard deviation and the noise difference is about three-quarters of a standard deviation. The results are consistent with market hesitation being most informative for burdens that buyers can partly recognize but cannot readily verify. Alternative benchmark specifications, out-of-fold reconstruction, and time-on-market thresholds support the stability of the classification and the main pattern. The analysis is correlational and treats price and duration as jointly realized transaction conditions rather than estimating a structural price–duration relationship.