Vulnerability to the property price cycle is more about who is ending up owing what than about the size of the price rise.
Interest-only loans are more likely to leave borrowers with less equity in their properties when prices fall.
Loans that have to be renegotiated or rolled over frequently provide trigger points where borrowers having "negative equity" - owing more than the value of the property - might default.
And longer build times mean a bigger overhang of unwanted property coming on to the market well after prices turn down.
Commercial property loans typically have these features of loan type, contract features and build time, so can be more dangerous for stability than home loans, they say.
But for either market, the flexibility of supply for new property is crucial.
If supply is responsive to a pick-up in demand, the price surge will be smaller in a boom. That is what happened in Atlanta, where plenty of new homes were able to be constructed as prices headed upwards.
That smaller price rise might suggest less damage was likely when the boom went bust, but that is not necessarily true, the RBA economists say.
"If supply is quite responsive, large amounts of new property will be constructed during the boom, creating an overhang of excess supply once the boom ends," they say.
As a result, prices can fall further despite the more muted upswing, putting people who had bought homes more than a decade before price peak into negative equity.
What's more, the greater availability of properties to buy during the boom means a great proportion of home-owners bought near the peak.
So it's not so much the size of the debt, but the type of debt and who owes it that matters, and the supply response is a big part of that.
"Our results imply that the level or change in aggregated indices of asset prices are not good guides to predicting the extent of financial distress during the bust, and neither is the amplitude of the cycle in credit," they say.
- AAP