6 ms·

Why home values may takes decades to recover

39 points by landist 18y ago

martythemaniak 18y ago
Comparing median household income to median house prices is probably 80% of what you need to explain the housing market, and this article does a pretty good job. The essence is that you can't sustainably spend more on a house than you make, so there is no reason to expect the historical ratio to change more. The only way you can reasonably expect that ratio to change in a dramatic way the way it did is if there was some underlying structural change in how people live. For example, a massive migration to dense cities where you're not spending hundreds a month for a car means you can, spend a larger proportion on housing, pushing that ratio up. But of course, we know that hasn't happened and will take decades if it ever does.
dantheman 18y ago
The whole concept of home value recovery is flawed. We don't talk about the recovery of gasoline prices. The concept that a bubbles peak price is somehow correct is by definition flawed.
- nsrivast 18y ago
  Still, there's a chance home values will undershoot below "fundamental value" for an extended period of time. But I agree phrases like "A home worth $300,000 may soon be worth $200,000 or less" are misleading.
- krschultz 18y ago
  That is an awful analogy. Aside from those in the oil industry or envirmentalists who want to discourage use, everyone likes low gasoline prices because energy prices are only a cost. The money you spend on gas it lost forever. The money you spend on a home is money you will some day get back. Whether it grows or not, most people expect its nominal value to at least stay constant. More likely the real dollar value will be constant and the nominal value will rise. When home prices fall precipatously it is a drag on the economy. Suddenly anyone under water on their mortgage or at a loss on their home can no longer sell, and are effectively locked into their home. This is inefficient because the best labor can not fluently move the most appropriate jobs. The money tied up in a falling home can not be reinvested. An over extended house can not be reversed mortgaged to fund a small business. It is nothing like gas prices. Low home prices are only good for those (like me) first entering market. But the number of those first entering the market will by definition be much smaller than the number already entrenched in it. Aside from a small percentage of speculative investors the popping of the bubble simply hammers anyone who bought a home in the last 5 years out of necessity and will continue to be a huge problem for our economy for years to come.
  - dantheman 18y ago
    Oh, I agree that some people are going to suffer because they overpaid for their houses, but you make it sound like every homeowner is in this same situation, which is definitely not the case. I do agree this is going to be a drag on the economy, lots of people are going to lose real money. We built houses that people cannot afford, we built houses in the wrong areas etc... we had a massive case of malinvestment so of course there is going to be pain when it's corrected that is only natural. Also a lot of people think houses are good investments, when most of the time they are not, in fact most people would be able to have a nicer place and save more money if they rented. Just because people believe something does mean it's true. Edit: Also a lot of people may feel like they're losing money, because the artificially high price that they thought there house was worse is no longer there -- whether or not purchased a house in the last few years.
  - netsp 18y ago
    High energy prices are good for whoever owns energy. Mostly it's countries with natural reserves. But there is nothing stopping anyone from investing in a way that ties his fate with theirs. A house deteriorates too. You invest in upkeep. The difference between the two are: (A) you buy housing all at once and (usually) pay over time. (B) housing is a manufactured good while oil is a resource. Sure it would be a difficult "adjustment" for those that saw their house as an investment if prices went into reverse in the long term. It would be a serious hit for those who are invested in multiple houses. But it would be a net win for society. If you own a house that is going up in value, you win nothing unless you sell. Even if you sell, you are most likely to lose since most people upgrade rather then downgrade or move to renting. If house prices went off a cliff new buyers would win, upgraders would win and "investors" would lose. The long term nature of the product would mena that it would take time for the benefits to affect the averages, but over time people would need to spend less on houses. This would make them weathier. The problem you describe is not inherent in houses. It is inherent in expectations. People made decisions based on expectation that houses are the best investment. That is the root of the problem. If the expectation had never existed, houses would be seen as goods and noone would be that worried about their house value going down. It would just be like buying an item at price X, one week before it goes on sale. That's not such an economic hit.
mattmcknight 18y ago
One thing that is left out of this analysis is the impact of inflation. While the inflation that is being introduced by the Fed buying Treasuries won't necessarily involve wage increases intially, it eventually will distort the price gains again. It's a blunt instrument to reduce the value of these massive debts that the US homeowners have incurred and the negative equity positions that people are in.
- nradov 18y ago
  Inflation only occurs when the sum of money and credit increases. So far lenders have been reducing credit faster than the Fed has been increasing the money supply. Perhaps that will turn around some day, but there is reason to think that we have already passed "peak credit" and such levels will not be seen again in our lifetimes. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/06/peak-credit.html http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/06/peak-cred...
  - mattmcknight 18y ago
    That is a misleading analysis. The credit you are referring to as part of the money supply is bank credit, which is created by the central bank when they introduce currency units. Credit has been moving from the private sector to the public sector. The US govt has already run 1T debt in Q1. What they couldn't borrow from abroad with treasuries, they had the fed print money to buy the excess treasuries. Now we're hearing noises about how the fed wants to issue bonds. Inflation is coming, just have to figure out what to hoard.
    - nradov 18y ago
      You haven't addressed the "peak credit" point. Deflation is upon us. Hoard dollars.
pj 18y ago
What is the value of homeownership? Why does the government give people incentives to buy homes in the form of tax breaks, etc? Is this to create more debt and therefore more currency in circulation or is it to benefit the homeowner in some way? It is failed government policy that set all this in motion, the question is: Why were those policies put in place? Are they for the people or for the government or what?
- mblakele 18y ago
  http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13491933 http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... and http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13492469 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... discuss some of these questions: "Governments subsidise home ownership because they think it encourages stable, more law-abiding neighbourhoods. The children of homeowners do better at school than the children of renters do. Homeowners are more engaged in local democracy. And, because homeowners must pay off their mortgages, housing supposedly encourages people to save more than they otherwise would."
  - smanek 18y ago
    Correlation != Causation Is it any surprise that the kind of people who save up a huge amount of money to make a down payment and are consistently responsible enough to always make large mortgage payments are 'good' people? By 'good' I simply mean the kind of people who abide by laws, encourage their children in their school work, take an active interest in local government, etc. This reminds me of a program they had in Illinois where the state decided to send books to all new parents. Some study found that children who grew up in houses with lots of books did better on a wide variety of metrics so the government reasoned that sending books to parents would somehow help the kids. It never occurred to them that the key was that type of people who bought/read a lot of books where also the type of people who were better parents.
    - mblakele 18y ago
      Oh, I agree - but I was answering a question: "Why does the government..." Is this scientific policy? Is this good policy? Those are different questions.
coolestuk 18y ago
I've been making the same points for a decade. The Bank of England was given the task of keeping inflation low, and their means of doing this was interest rates. When inflation was getting close to the acceptable ceiling, they increased interest rates. Technically we had an inflation rate below 3%, but only because house prices were excluded from the inflation figures. Mortgage payments were probably most working people's single biggest payment, yet the huge rises in those costs (as house prices increased) didn't go into the inflation figures. If they had, then inflation would have been well above 3% and interest rates would have had to rise, dampening the housing market. I can't help but believe that governments were happy to exploit the electorate's belief that they were doing well financially, when in fact it was an illusion. House prices will have to fall by about 50% (the figures for the UK look pretty similar to that USAToday presentation). People were prepared to take on ridiculous loans when the bubble was being inflated, because they thought they would be unable to afford property if they waited. In fact, the situation in the UK sounds like it might have been worse than in the US. There were significant numbers of 110% mortgages available in the UK until a couple of years ago. The BBC did an expose in 2003 showing that major banks were encouraging customers to lie about their income in order to be able to buy property. Yet this expose has been buried, never to be mentioned. The government and the financial regulators did not want to know. The median salary for a graduate in London is £24,000; the median price for property is £335,000. I have friends who came from working-class families who were still able to buy houses when they were students back in the 1970s.
- fauigerzigerk 18y ago
  I don't think house prices in the UK are going to fall 50%. Unlike other countries that had a house price bubble the UK did not have a house building bubble, and it didn't have a house building bubble because there is not enough land to build on. The UK has a population density of over 250 people per square km whereas the US has a population density of 34. I agree with the other points you make though. Indebtedness in the UK is much worse than in the US or almost anywhere else.
  - alecco 18y ago
    Real estate in the UK and especially in London is very complex and unfair. Properties are usually on leasehold for a period within 120 years. It's one of the most unfair systems in the world. Families can't keep their full investment across generations.
nostrademons 18y ago
The data is great, but I really wish they would start the Y-axis of their graphs at zero. It's easy to obscure the true magnitude of a change by picking an arbitrary starting point. </pet-peeve>
- thwarted 18y ago
  The true magnitude isn't the point, the relative change is, and limiting the graph to a specific sub-range makes it easier to read because it is is more straight forward to following the tick lines to the actual label numbers on the Y-axis. There are a lot of ways to misrepresent data, and data on graphs, but this isn't one of them. These graphs are especially nice because the Y-axis labels are in a largish font, so it's more difficult to misinterpret the scale. I do have a minor problem with the last graph though, "Monthly supply of homes for sale". Since this is meant to compare existing homes to new homes, the line graph and the thickness of the line doesn't convey enough of the target information; this would be better done as a bar graph, with two bars, one for existing and one for new, for each year. I had a boss once who made graphs with three Y-axes on them (two on the left and one on the right) and multiple X-axes, all in different scales, mixed linear and exponential. He tried to use different colors, but would then print it out in greyscale. They were extremely hard to read and get anything useful out of, which I always thought was part of his goal.

39 points by landist 18y ago

Comparing median household income to median house prices is probably 80% of what you need to explain the housing market, and this article does a pretty good job. The essence is that you can't sustainably spend more on a house than you make, so there is no reason to expect the historical ratio to change more. The only way you can reasonably expect that ratio to change in a dramatic way the way it did is if there was some underlying structural change in how people live. For example, a massive migration to dense cities where you're not spending hundreds a month for a car means you can, spend a larger proportion on housing, pushing that ratio up. But of course, we know that hasn't happened and will take decades if it ever does.

dantheman 18y ago

The whole concept of home value recovery is flawed. We don't talk about the recovery of gasoline prices. The concept that a bubbles peak price is somehow correct is by definition flawed.

nsrivast 18y ago
Still, there's a chance home values will undershoot below "fundamental value" for an extended period of time. But I agree phrases like "A home worth $300,000 may soon be worth $200,000 or less" are misleading.
krschultz 18y ago
That is an awful analogy. Aside from those in the oil industry or envirmentalists who want to discourage use, everyone likes low gasoline prices because energy prices are only a cost. The money you spend on gas it lost forever. The money you spend on a home is money you will some day get back. Whether it grows or not, most people expect its nominal value to at least stay constant. More likely the real dollar value will be constant and the nominal value will rise. When home prices fall precipatously it is a drag on the economy. Suddenly anyone under water on their mortgage or at a loss on their home can no longer sell, and are effectively locked into their home. This is inefficient because the best labor can not fluently move the most appropriate jobs. The money tied up in a falling home can not be reinvested. An over extended house can not be reversed mortgaged to fund a small business. It is nothing like gas prices. Low home prices are only good for those (like me) first entering market. But the number of those first entering the market will by definition be much smaller than the number already entrenched in it. Aside from a small percentage of speculative investors the popping of the bubble simply hammers anyone who bought a home in the last 5 years out of necessity and will continue to be a huge problem for our economy for years to come.
- dantheman 18y ago
  Oh, I agree that some people are going to suffer because they overpaid for their houses, but you make it sound like every homeowner is in this same situation, which is definitely not the case. I do agree this is going to be a drag on the economy, lots of people are going to lose real money. We built houses that people cannot afford, we built houses in the wrong areas etc... we had a massive case of malinvestment so of course there is going to be pain when it's corrected that is only natural. Also a lot of people think houses are good investments, when most of the time they are not, in fact most people would be able to have a nicer place and save more money if they rented. Just because people believe something does mean it's true. Edit: Also a lot of people may feel like they're losing money, because the artificially high price that they thought there house was worse is no longer there -- whether or not purchased a house in the last few years.
- netsp 18y ago
  High energy prices are good for whoever owns energy. Mostly it's countries with natural reserves. But there is nothing stopping anyone from investing in a way that ties his fate with theirs. A house deteriorates too. You invest in upkeep. The difference between the two are: (A) you buy housing all at once and (usually) pay over time. (B) housing is a manufactured good while oil is a resource. Sure it would be a difficult "adjustment" for those that saw their house as an investment if prices went into reverse in the long term. It would be a serious hit for those who are invested in multiple houses. But it would be a net win for society. If you own a house that is going up in value, you win nothing unless you sell. Even if you sell, you are most likely to lose since most people upgrade rather then downgrade or move to renting. If house prices went off a cliff new buyers would win, upgraders would win and "investors" would lose. The long term nature of the product would mena that it would take time for the benefits to affect the averages, but over time people would need to spend less on houses. This would make them weathier. The problem you describe is not inherent in houses. It is inherent in expectations. People made decisions based on expectation that houses are the best investment. That is the root of the problem. If the expectation had never existed, houses would be seen as goods and noone would be that worried about their house value going down. It would just be like buying an item at price X, one week before it goes on sale. That's not such an economic hit.

mattmcknight 18y ago

One thing that is left out of this analysis is the impact of inflation. While the inflation that is being introduced by the Fed buying Treasuries won't necessarily involve wage increases intially, it eventually will distort the price gains again. It's a blunt instrument to reduce the value of these massive debts that the US homeowners have incurred and the negative equity positions that people are in.

nradov 18y ago
Inflation only occurs when the sum of money and credit increases. So far lenders have been reducing credit faster than the Fed has been increasing the money supply. Perhaps that will turn around some day, but there is reason to think that we have already passed "peak credit" and such levels will not be seen again in our lifetimes. http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/06/peak-credit.html http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/06/peak-cred...
- mattmcknight 18y ago
  That is a misleading analysis. The credit you are referring to as part of the money supply is bank credit, which is created by the central bank when they introduce currency units. Credit has been moving from the private sector to the public sector. The US govt has already run 1T debt in Q1. What they couldn't borrow from abroad with treasuries, they had the fed print money to buy the excess treasuries. Now we're hearing noises about how the fed wants to issue bonds. Inflation is coming, just have to figure out what to hoard.
  - nradov 18y ago
    You haven't addressed the "peak credit" point. Deflation is upon us. Hoard dollars.

pj 18y ago

What is the value of homeownership? Why does the government give people incentives to buy homes in the form of tax breaks, etc? Is this to create more debt and therefore more currency in circulation or is it to benefit the homeowner in some way? It is failed government policy that set all this in motion, the question is: Why were those policies put in place? Are they for the people or for the government or what?

mblakele 18y ago
http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13491933 http://www.economist.com/finance/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... and http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13492469 http://www.economist.com/opinion/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1... discuss some of these questions: "Governments subsidise home ownership because they think it encourages stable, more law-abiding neighbourhoods. The children of homeowners do better at school than the children of renters do. Homeowners are more engaged in local democracy. And, because homeowners must pay off their mortgages, housing supposedly encourages people to save more than they otherwise would."
- smanek 18y ago
  Correlation != Causation Is it any surprise that the kind of people who save up a huge amount of money to make a down payment and are consistently responsible enough to always make large mortgage payments are 'good' people? By 'good' I simply mean the kind of people who abide by laws, encourage their children in their school work, take an active interest in local government, etc. This reminds me of a program they had in Illinois where the state decided to send books to all new parents. Some study found that children who grew up in houses with lots of books did better on a wide variety of metrics so the government reasoned that sending books to parents would somehow help the kids. It never occurred to them that the key was that type of people who bought/read a lot of books where also the type of people who were better parents.
  - mblakele 18y ago
    Oh, I agree - but I was answering a question: "Why does the government..." Is this scientific policy? Is this good policy? Those are different questions.

coolestuk 18y ago

I've been making the same points for a decade. The Bank of England was given the task of keeping inflation low, and their means of doing this was interest rates. When inflation was getting close to the acceptable ceiling, they increased interest rates. Technically we had an inflation rate below 3%, but only because house prices were excluded from the inflation figures. Mortgage payments were probably most working people's single biggest payment, yet the huge rises in those costs (as house prices increased) didn't go into the inflation figures. If they had, then inflation would have been well above 3% and interest rates would have had to rise, dampening the housing market. I can't help but believe that governments were happy to exploit the electorate's belief that they were doing well financially, when in fact it was an illusion. House prices will have to fall by about 50% (the figures for the UK look pretty similar to that USAToday presentation). People were prepared to take on ridiculous loans when the bubble was being inflated, because they thought they would be unable to afford property if they waited. In fact, the situation in the UK sounds like it might have been worse than in the US. There were significant numbers of 110% mortgages available in the UK until a couple of years ago. The BBC did an expose in 2003 showing that major banks were encouraging customers to lie about their income in order to be able to buy property. Yet this expose has been buried, never to be mentioned. The government and the financial regulators did not want to know. The median salary for a graduate in London is £24,000; the median price for property is £335,000. I have friends who came from working-class families who were still able to buy houses when they were students back in the 1970s.

fauigerzigerk 18y ago
I don't think house prices in the UK are going to fall 50%. Unlike other countries that had a house price bubble the UK did not have a house building bubble, and it didn't have a house building bubble because there is not enough land to build on. The UK has a population density of over 250 people per square km whereas the US has a population density of 34. I agree with the other points you make though. Indebtedness in the UK is much worse than in the US or almost anywhere else.
- alecco 18y ago
  Real estate in the UK and especially in London is very complex and unfair. Properties are usually on leasehold for a period within 120 years. It's one of the most unfair systems in the world. Families can't keep their full investment across generations.

nostrademons 18y ago

The data is great, but I really wish they would start the Y-axis of their graphs at zero. It's easy to obscure the true magnitude of a change by picking an arbitrary starting point. </pet-peeve>

thwarted 18y ago
The true magnitude isn't the point, the relative change is, and limiting the graph to a specific sub-range makes it easier to read because it is is more straight forward to following the tick lines to the actual label numbers on the Y-axis. There are a lot of ways to misrepresent data, and data on graphs, but this isn't one of them. These graphs are especially nice because the Y-axis labels are in a largish font, so it's more difficult to misinterpret the scale. I do have a minor problem with the last graph though, "Monthly supply of homes for sale". Since this is meant to compare existing homes to new homes, the line graph and the thickness of the line doesn't convey enough of the target information; this would be better done as a bar graph, with two bars, one for existing and one for new, for each year. I had a boss once who made graphs with three Y-axes on them (two on the left and one on the right) and multiple X-axes, all in different scales, mixed linear and exponential. He tried to use different colors, but would then print it out in greyscale. They were extremely hard to read and get anything useful out of, which I always thought was part of his goal.