The Broken Housing Market Conference, London

The Institute for Civil Engineering in Westminster hosted a one-day housing conference – ‘the broken housing market’ on June 1, 2018. The conference was organised by RICS, NIESR and CaCHE. The conference had a starry array of speakers, including David Miles, Ian Mulheirn, Kate Barker, Steven Aldridge, Paul Cheshire, Christine Whitehead and John Muellbauer, among others. I was asked to provide closing remarks which meant I had to stay honest and really concentrate throughout the four sessions, 13 speakers and discussion sessions. Short videos from several speakers can be found here.

The event was named after last year’s white paper – Fixing our Broken Housing Market – and covered different dimensions of what is conceivably wrong with housing and what needs to be done to address such shortcomings. It is important to state from the outset that different views were forcefully expressed about these problems e.g. whether they were ostensibly on the supply-side or demand side (or indeed both) or indeed were mainly about policy failure. Some of these differences reflected disciplinary or background factors but also in some cases concerned different approaches to housing economics as a sub-discipline.

The structure of the conference was in four parts. The first session was entitled housing and consumption and dealt with many of the familiar housing and macroeconomy questions – how does rising house prices feed into consumption and additional mortgage re-leverage; what role does housing collateral play; how has the UK market been changed by mortgage stress tests, lower LTVs and the macro-prudential policy context. The second session was ostensibly about affordability though it somewhat morphed into a much more fundamental discussion of how one views housing as either a consumption good or as an asset. After lunch Kate Barker reprised the housing supply question 14 years on from the review of housing supply. Stephen Aldridge provided a substantial reply. The final session involved four policy papers aiming different cases for reform and one which raised wider questions about what we actually mean by housing policy.

The main things that struck me today were the following:

• There is a lively debate between mainstream housing economists about what is going on in the housing market, how it fits together and what needs to be done.
• Mulheirn argued that the housing problem is primarily an asset issue, not a housing services question (in many places housing consumption costs are reasonable and stable). He also argued that the problem is much more a demand than a supply shortage issue. This was not accepted by many in the room who remain wedded to the need for more supply.
• There was much discussion of housing tax reform but it was strongly encouraged that promoters of housing/land tax reform invest in good policy design and careful, cautious implementation.
• Ian Mulheirn also spoke about a policy trilemma i.e. that it is possible to have one or even two but not three policy objectives simultaneously – where those objectives are financial stability, home ownership growth and pro-owner fiscal policies.
• We are still arguing about the definition of affordability but linked to this the assumptions set out in banker affordability stress tests are highly sensitive and contested i.e. they seem much more conservative than most credible independent forecasts of inflation and interest rates.
• David Miles sketched out a model that might help explain the future long-term trajectory of real house prices and argued because of the sensitivities of two key elasticities (between land and structures) and between housing and non-housing consumption, it was very difficult to confidently work out the fundamental real house price – and this matters materially for macro prudential policy if one is to have a benchmark from which to assess how far away prices are from a fundamental equilibrium. As an aside, he also argued that the tax relief reductions on private renting landlords were ill thought through.
• Christine Whitehead distinguished her interest on policy details from the grand design others had for housing and policy reform (even though she agreed with the aims). Her point was that housing policy has different governmental masters (MHCLG, DWP, Treasury, the Bank, etc), a plethora of different stakeholders and an alarming tendency to generate new policy instruments; yet little clarity on what the housing policy was really for or about – and more to the point in her view, it has always been much like this.

I particularly liked the eight stylised housing facts (i.e. that we should all agree with and take as our starting point) as laid out by Stephen Aldridge. These were:

1. Affordability pressures exist, particularly in London and the south east
2. There has been a 50% rise in the number of concealed households (alongside many more young people staying with parents)
3. Most young people who don’t currently, still want to own their own home
4. A shortage of housing supply is indicated
5. We can build more homes
6. We are building more homes than in recent previous years.
7. A sustained substantial increase in housing supply is required to impact on affordability
8. There is plenty of land in the right places for additional housing supply.

In my wrap-up, I tried to set out how CaCHE might play an ongoing role in this area. Kate Barker had indicated in her talk that the new centre was a rare opportunity to provide evidence and build conceptually. We certainly want to do just that. I also made the point that the private rented market is a complex mosaic of well-defined and largely independent segments on either side of the market. This is neither well evidenced nor conceptually understood sufficiently to allow us to have confidence that policy-makers reflect the sector’s subtleties. This led to my final comment, arising from the on-going policy transfer exemplar project we are undertaking, that we do not as housing researchers make anything like the full use of the policy studies or policy analysis literature i.e. the models that might shed light on the policy process in housing. We need to change that fact as we move on to our more empirical research.

 

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Towards a Housing Solutions Platform

This week I had my first trip to Brussels and participated in a roundtable established by the Friends of Europe to discuss pan-European steps to deliver more affordable housing supply and in particular discuss examples of genuine financing innovative housing solutions found in different member states. This is happening not long after Housing Europe published their 2017 State of Housing in the EU.

This may not sound exactly riveting but it was actually a fascinating day on many levels – how the EU and its different cogs and gears work; how such meetings are organised and conducted; who says what; and, what can one derive from the substance of the discussion. The roundtable was set up as a large square table in classic style with more than 40 folk assembled around it. No break-out sessions or smaller conversations but instead a series of short and some even briefer contributions marshalled by the chair for the best part of 4 hours.

I was one of the first speakers talking about evidence influenced housing policy, what works and the potential value and risks of housing policy transfer or mobility given national institutional differences, contexts and the like. After my bit was over I was able to just sit and listen. There were several very interesting themes running through the day:

• Housing First was a recurring cross-national motif. There was an excellent presentation by Finland’s Y-Foundation and also by Tom Bennett who runs the Housing First Transition Fund in Glasgow. The Finnish contribution, by Juha Kaakinen, included the nice point that rough sleeping was tackled so effectively in Finland for two reasons – Housing First but also additional affordable/social supply.
• From the chair in particular, but also around the table, there was much made of the need and potential utility from rigorous economic evaluation of the wider net benefits of preventative housing interventions regarding homelessness and affordable housing supply – critical to making the social, economic, public finance and infrastructure arguments for the wider benefits attached to more and better housing. I thought this also spoke to evaluability assessments which brings stakeholders together before an intervention begins, work through a shared theory of change and decide collectively an agreed evaluation process.
• Many cities face problems with short term ‘touristic’ letting most notably through Air BnB. There are clearly lessons to learn and share from the experiences of cities like Barcelona and Paris.
• The growing importance of partnership by public and private sectors with foundations, endowments and philanthropy especially with regard to filling gaps, providing patient capital and supporting the gathering of rigorous evidence.
• The difference in size, scale and opportunity is of course very important across EU members but this led to an interesting line of discussion that smaller countries like Finland and Scotland were better placed in some respects to experiment and innovate with new and interesting delivery models. The focus on smallness also raises the question of spread and scale of successful projects – this is a challenge colleagues wrestled with in What Works Scotland.

My own wider reflections on the day were threefold: first, finance and subsidy are part of an irreconcilable, irreducible conundrum for low cost housing (its cost can only be reduced via different more or less novel ways of providing and subsidising – equity, land, construction and finance). My Canadian colleague Derek Ballantyne argues that in reality there are few genuine innovations, merely different ways of assembling and packaging these elements but they all involve different ways of subsidising, taxing and profiting from elements of the delivery of new housing and how it is subsequently operated. Ballantyne also concludes that it all comes down in large to political commitment to resource the subsidy, in whatever form it comes.

Second, and related, there are really two choices – first, the size of the macro resource commitment by governments to housing (made up of capital and other finding subsidy, tax breaks, guarantees and personal housing subsidy). Cut the programme and less is possible:  it may force states to divvy up what is left in different ways – spreading shallower subsidy further or focusing on fewer units but with deeper subsidy. Alongside the macro challenge are, second,  the myriad micro housing delivery models which are more or less efficient, cost-effective and/or prone to perversities, unintended consequences and other problems. There was much talk about using public finance devices to lever in private equity participation, though we must watch out for possible moral hazard.

Finally, I was struck listening to the discussion of public funding and subsidy how much of our housing subsidy is actually lost through home owner tax breaks and also inefficient taxation such as transaction taxes rather than, for instance, more efficient recurring taxes on land. I was reminded of Hernando De Soto’s phrase ‘dead capital’ concept that he applied to unused property-based collateral. I wondered if there might be mileage in a new phrase, ‘dead subsidy’ referring to wasted, and often capitalised, housing tax breaks (and of course ‘dead tax’ might also apply to those transaction taxes and their own micro-allocative inefficiencies)?

A little unexpectedly, I found the platform format and discussion rewarding and thought-provoking. This was in no small part down to the efforts of the chair (Dharmedra Kanani) and also the choice of discussants put before us.  I have only mentioned a few of the big ideas circulating yesterday. I am sure we will hear much more from this group in the months and years to come.

 

The Future of the US Mortgage Market

“The trigger for the most recent crisis remains the part of the global financial system that has been least reformed”. The Economist, August 20, 2016.

There is a thorough and thought-provoking diagnosis of contemporary US mortgage markets in the USA in the new edition of the Economist. You may ask why this is a significant issue worth attention. First, the proximity of US mortgage securitisation to the global financial crisis and the extent to which earlier structural and other challenges have been repaired is important for the world financial system not least because the rest of the world owns trillions of dollars of US mortgage debt. Second, the US market has had a lengthy and difficult period which has had all manner of knock-on effects for housing, communities and the economy. Third, there is the key question of the future – how stable, resilient and sustainable is the current system and also proposals for reform. Finally, how relevant is any of this to the UK’s mortgage market?

The article argues that despite the rebalancing of Wall Street banks since 2008, alongside the banks sits the mortgage sector, which creates almost as much credit as the banks but unlike them the housing credit sector is much less capitalised and only just in profit. US mortgage debt is of the order of $11 trillion. The Economist argues that the taxpayer subsidies the system to the tune of $150 billion a year (tax breaks but also the indirect effect on interest rates of the Fed purchasing mortgage bonds). This is in part because of the conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, or de facto nationalisation of the great majority of the US mortgage sector (at least 2/3 of new mortgages originate from agencies of government). The economist concludes that it is not the market but ‘administrative fiat’ which determines mortgage volumes, the structure of loans and attitudes to risk.

The collapse after 2008 led to major changes in the regulation, ownership and practice operating in the mortgage lending sector. The Economist stresses the withdrawal of traditional lenders from mainstream new home loans to be replaced by specialist orginators. Second, the Government’s rescue of the system between 2008-2012 left them in control of large parts of that system and in particular of securitization of mortgages. Third, although the old derivatives market has been largely removed, it is still the case that the ownership of mortgage assets is still widely distributed across the banks and internationally.

This is where the Economist’s argument gets a bit schizophrenic – they argue that on the one hand there is too little regulation of the new originators of mortgage loans is too loose but at the same time the rest of the mortgage market is far too regulated – with 10,000 pages of law and rules that tighten up who gets loan, what kinds of property and loan types are eligible. Yet loan to value ratios are weakly controlled and 95% LTV loans are increasing (25% of new loans in 2012) and down payment regulations have been loosened.

The upshot for the authors is that the US mortgage system seems to be playing two roles – providing liquidity in the mortgage bond market but also using implicit and explicit subsidy to boost home ownership. What is to be done –the Economist is not keen on just leaving it alone (which itself is a common response after the shocks of 2008 and thereafter). Instead, they want a market solution but also note that with the status quo remaining because of the dominant role of the state, a future default crisis in the mortgage market will need to be bailed out by the taxpayer and this might be huge.

What is the market alternative? Force mortgage lenders to recapitalise like the banks on Wall Street and at the same time raise fees to create profit signals and incentives to take risks (and bear their costs). Administrative control and subsidy would be reduced and mortgage rates would probably go up a bit too. The Economist reckons this would require about $400 billion of new capital.

There are however difficult political economy barriers to such reform: the Government currently receives income from its conservatorships (but does not have their debts on its books) and of course the twin reduction of subsidy and higher interest rates (plus potentially sounder market criteria and regulation for lending) does not win support from the middle classes.

This all sounds like the policy reform problems we have discussed many times before – important coalitions and stakeholders who thwart reform even when it is in society’s long term interests. Figuring out ways to build consensus or use opportunities to act while sorting out the design and implementation of system wide reform, and indeed to compensate or mitigate the impacts on losers from reform – is a challenging mix. Default to inaction is made all the more likely by the need to get new enacting legislation through a partisan Congress.

While one may not necessarily agree with the precise policy thrust in the article, the problems are real enough. While not accepting the prognosis we still have to confront how to make policy well in a complex and uncertain setting. For those thinking about wishing to tilt the UK mortgage market to or from further regulation, it is worth considering the experience of the different and distinctive US setting.

Thinking about local housing market volatility

A recent paper in Bank Underground (the Bank of England’s new blog site) by Arzu Uluc uses an interesting local-level data set (325 local authorities in England covering 1997-2009) with which to examine local housing booms and busts. The underlying model draws on data including real house prices, real gross disposable household income per capita, dwelling stock per capita and various mortgage market variables like loan to income, loan to value and the share of interest-only mortgages.

The author concludes that the local research allows us to infer (and reasonably so) that volatile housing markets can ‘threaten financial and macroeconomic stability’. Credit conditions in terms of the key ratios and types of mortgage products play an important role through the ‘1997-2009 housing cycle’.

Uluc presents his empirical work by generating six stylized facts. These are:

1. Real house prices rose on average by 150% between 1997 and 2007 and then fell 12% by the end of 2009.
2. Changes to the proportion of high loan to income mortgages were positively correlated with local housing booms and busts.
3. There is a negative relationship between the changes to the proportion of high loan to value mortgages and the size of local booms and busts.
4. Changes in the share of interest only mortgages were pro-cyclical (similar to 1. above).
5. Housing booms and busts were also associated with real drivers like real income and dwelling stock growth.
6. The bigger the local boom, the larger the subsequent bust.

A few caveats are in order – it is not clear why local authority data is particularly appropriate rather than broader more functional geographies; nor does it appear from the blog that there is spatial dependency accounted for in the analysis. I also wondered if the London effect needed to be explicitly modelled (or indeed some sense of North and South)? On the other hand, the author is clearly concerned about attribution and possible reverse causality or confounding factors in the models deployed. These are all things that can no doubt be explored in a longer paper.

What about the bigger messages?  The model is best summarised by a quote from the post: ‘the econometric analysis…suggests that booms and busts ere associated with both real factors and credit loosening. Higher real income growth [was] associated with larger booms in [the] 1997-2004 period, and in 2007-09 areas with higher growth in the dwelling stock per capita tended to see larger price falls”.

Thus, and despite the fall in endowment mortgage volume shares after 1997, changes in the share of interest only mortgages were associated with local house price booms. Similarly, higher loan to income ratio shares of new mortgages were associated with local booms. The interesting negative relationship between high loan to value mortgages as a share of the total and local house price growth – may be explained by the growth of the share of home movers as opposed to first time buyers among total transactions and the increased financial support utilised by remaining successful first time buyers from family and other savings (which also drove down LTV ratios).

As Uluc stresses, there are reverse causality explanations and possibly confounding omitted variables that may instead better explain what is going on – but the associations found are striking. It is a reminder of how difficult it can be to disentangle the relationship between the real housing market and monetary transmission through credit variables – something well known in the wider housing and economy literature but just as striking here.

Stylised facts are useful, but as the author points out, they are the starting point that we then develop models and theories from and look at fresh data to test the ideas that originally flow from these facts. It would therefore be interesting to extend this data forward beyond 2009 and also to aggregate a sub-sample of the local authorities into clusters that approximate for sub-regional housing market areas. If we did so, would we also be able to detect the influence of the changing regulation and practice of mortgage lenders in more recent years?

Housing Policy and the Election ‘Unpacked’

I have put a link here to a podcast I did yesterday with Alex Marsh while at the Housing Studies Association conference in York. It is a tour through the pre-manifesto proposals and pledges by the main parties with regular digressions into Scotland. We also talked about housing supply, property taxation, social housing, private renting, welfare benefits and demand-side home ownership policies. Hope you find it interesting. You will also find the podcast at Alex’s Archives.

International Evidence on Housing Booms

This post authored by Alex Marsh and Ken Gibb

A recent NIESR paper by Armstrong and Davis (November 2014) compares the last two booms and busts in major OECD country housing markets. The authors present a thoughtful macroeconomic analysis of national housing markets and from there conduct panel data analysis of the determinants of house prices focusing on financial, debt and related variables.

The authors argue that comparison of the two most recent housing market cycles (1985-94 and 2002-11) can test the hypothesis that there was something unique about the most recent boom and its aftermath. They state that the housing market is widely considered to be the main cause of the global financial crisis (quoting such authorities as the IMF). However, the authors come away from overall reading of the data for the two cycles unconvinced. In their view the two cycles are sufficiently similar that it difficult to draw the conclusion that the most recent cycle is different in meaningful ways: it is certainly not unique. The implications is that if the received wisdom is incorrect and other factors were important in causing the crisis then macro-prudential policies in countries like the UK may be incorrectly targeted at the control of house prices and mortgage lending.

We are interested in this broad area for several reasons: why did economists miss the bubble nature of the housing market and its departure form fundamentals? Why did they miss the downturn in national housing markets? How plausible are the microfoundations of the models being used to analyze the housing market and explain what is actually going on? What do these analytical weaknesses tell us about the health or otherwise of economics and its capacity to evolve and learn for future challenges?

On reading the Armstrong and Davis paper we were struck by several points that we felt warranted comment. First, is there something of a straw man at the heart of this paper – do we really consider the house price boom to be the source of the GFC? Second, while the descriptive analysis is valuable and the technique is sound and well-derived from the literature, might it have been done differently? Third, does the principal policy inference, regarding the greater regulation of house prices and mortgage lending, stand up on the basis of this analysis?

Do analysts really generally view the housing market boom as the cause of the GFC? It is surely more that the sub-prime securitization and its exposure in the market for US mortgages in 2003 or 2004 onwards left the housing market vulnerable. Accelerating default contagion both collapsed the US housing market nationally (and that was different from the previous cycle) and spread through those exotic mortgage securities to stifle the wholesale money market and create the credit crunch which negatively impacted in many national housing markets across the OECD. Housing, and more particularly lending for housing, triggered a national market downturn which undermined wider international banking and thereafter fed back into other national housing systems.

Unfortunately, the data and analysis offered by Armstrong and Davis does not allow for this type of argument to be tested. In some senses, it requires a reconceptualisation of the housing (finance) market to recognise interdependence and network effects. It certainly requires a stronger focus on institutional innovations that is possible with the data available. To be fair, having presented their analysis, Armstrong and Davis note a range of factors and hypotheses ripe for further investigation. These include some of these institutional changes. So from our perspective it feels a little like the paper stops before it has a chance to grapple with some of the most interesting questions.

The analysis, understandably, constrains itself to using standard periods in order to attempt to capture national housing market cycles. Yet, despite the widely recognised increase in the synchronisation of housing market cycles cross-nationally, there is no reason to think that the OECD countries examined had similar period market cycles. The UK for instance moved into housing market downturn much later than the US. Moreover, downturns had different implications because of different default laws and bankruptcy implications. Getting a stronger sense of the timing of the turning points of these national cycles would itself be a useful contributor to the causal story being constructed.

Finally, the paper draws the policy inference that greater caution may be justified regarding the strength of the macroprudential case for regulating house prices and mortgage lending. It is important here to be clear what macroprudential regulation is seeking to achieve. Setting aside the macroeconomic stability arguments for a moment, isn’t there a housing-specific case for moderating the volatility of house prices and reducing market cycles? Whether macroprudential policy instruments are the right levers to use or are effective in damping price cycles are separate – and bigger – questions.

It may be that financial instruments are less effective than more direct housing policies in stabilizing the housing market. Or it may be that such policies can be complementary and work in tandem. Yet, in reality we face a context in which there is a willingness to consider active macroprudential regulation but a reluctance to intervene directly to generate greater housing market stability – if not an inclination among politicians to introduce policies that are more likely to increase volatility. Macroprudential tools can have more or less targeted impacts on housing markets. We should be cautious about bypassing them as a policy option. There is, of course, much more to learn about the most effective design for macroprudential policy instruments. This is an area in which a number of countries are experimenting with different approaches and there is undoubtedly scope for cross-national policy learning.

Alex Marsh is at the University of Bristol and is the purveyor of Alex’s archives at http://www.alexsarchives.org/

Housing Economics Questioned

I have been at a European Network for Housing Research housing economics workshop in Spain. Among a series of more or less complete papers on microeconomics, housing finance, policy papers and the like, Alex Marsh and I presented a highly preliminary paper about the extent to which (and when) housing economists anticipated, understood and communicated the impacts of the housing market/mortgage market triggers of the Global Financial Crisis.

I don’t want to talk about the paper now – it is very early and rough (that is what workshops are for after all) but the discussion did raise a few interesting points about the sociology of academic economics and the place of the sub discipline within a wider field, and the international dimension. Moreover, it raises questions about the readiness of the academic community to support and facilitate innovation and experimentation that may be more widely beneficial.

Non economists often criticise the imperialist tendencies of mainstream economics across the wider social sciences. However, this may also pertain within the discipline in terms of how specific sub-disciplines evolve. For instance, the housing economics publishing outlets are clearly dominated by North American journals such as Real Estate Economics, Journal of Urban Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and one or two others. While there are mainstream economists who also publish in more multidisciplinary places like Housing Studies, Urban Studies and Environment and Planning – it is clear that getting ahead means learning, applying and privileging a specific set of methods, assumptions, forms of knowledge at the expense of others. Of course, a more pluralistic philosophy to economics research and publishing is greatly hampered by criteria for promotion, REF panels and the like. But, I would argue, it’s long term consequence may be lessen research impact on public policy, business and society.

While there may be rigour and logic and evidence of many good pieces of useful work to support what mainstream housing economics has achieved over the decades, may it nonetheless, to use one of the phrases so beloved of US economists, be leaving something ‘on the table’ by applying this intellectual straitjacket?

To take one example, it is right that we should look closely at the links between housing markets, mortgage markets and the financial alchemy that led to the sub-prime chaos that did down the banking system – but housing economists should not simply rely on the slavish application of ideas from financial theories designed for specific financial products and imagine they apply sensibly to the very unusual commodity that is a house. While I’m sure there is much to learn (and indeed has been learnt usefully) by such approaches, even a cursory reading of the main journals suggests that there is too ready a willingness to suspend the key characteristics that set housing apart in order to shoehorn it into more orthodox financial analyses.

Both from the reading on cross-national housing economics and from simply being located in Europe and listening to differential national research papers in recent days – one cannot not be struck by the importance of different national contexts, legal and other institutional practices that filter international financial processes and suggest quite different stories and conclusions about our housing systems. In Britain, we are forever telling our students that supply inelasticity is comparatively very low compared with the USA – but while we more or less factor in key institutions like the idiosyncratic planning system and our volume house builders, many housing models still look to me, uncomfortably similar to those of their American cousins. Is there therefore an unintended danger in over homogenising our research?

I imagine many will disagree with this perspective and say plenty of good new work is forthcoming. I would not disagree but I do not think that means we are doing as well as we could. Far from it. A thousand flowers do not bloom, and, perhaps, if we do not offer a sufficiently pluralist approach to housing research to encourage the possible new hybrids, they never will see the light of day?

Private Renting and Institutional Investment: Possibility, Grail or Fable?

Ever since the original deregulation of private renting in 1988, there have been repeated calls for policies intended to promote private renting investment by means of our financial institutions. The pension funds and insurance companies need to earn a target rate of return across a diversified portfolio.  If that portfolio includes a small share (typically) held in commercial property, might they not also invest in market renting? This, it was argued, would help to modernize the sector, encourage new build purpose build renting, normalize the rental market and even encourage new partnerships with a potential role for housing associations as management agents. This would be good for the fluidity and stability of the housing system as a whole and would further wider economic objectives.

We have seen over the years tax based vehicles, plans for guarantees, loan funds and trusts – but the sector remains largely unincorporated and is fragmented among many small-scale landlords (the exception being the student housing model). This is despite the growth of buy to let and the sector over the last 10 years (even with the interruption of the housing market and economy collapse), as owning became less accessible and more expensive to achieve.

What now for institutional investment and will the current wave of policies and subsidies for the rental market achieve the desired effect? I was a minor player in a new report published this week for Homes for Scotland, written with Christine Whitehead, Kath Scanlon and Peter Williams. The report is called Building the Rented Sector and is available at http://www.homesforscotland.com/publications.aspx . The focus of the research was to clarify how to help house builders increase the supply of new homes for the rental market. The research sought to identify key barriers to investment and development and how we might overcome them through new financial models.  Aimed at the Scottish housing sector, the research also speaks to the wider UK rental market.

What were the main findings?

First, the principal challenge is to create investment opportunities that are profitable for developers but also earn a sufficiently high risk-adjusted rate of return for investors (from both income and expected capital gain) that exceeds their opportunity cost of investment. While most of the growth in private renting has come from the reuse of existing stock in the last few years, the underlying strong demand for rental housing could be met from new investment in purpose built rented housing provided the barriers to earning the required returns could be overcome. Our starting point was evidence from the sector that there is increasing interest in the potential for large-scale investment on higher density urban sites financed by institutions and managed professionally.

Second, interviewees told us that the main barriers to investment were: the difficulties developers have in competing for land for renting against owner-occupation; the lack of development finance; low yields; lack of investor experience and hardly any performance data to benchmark with; the need for scale; negative investor and local government attitudes to the sector; poor quality and expensive management; reputational risk and uncertainties around the taxation and regulatory regimes. The lack of investment, also came down to a number of specific factors, prominent amongst them were variations in professional language and understanding of basic issues such as planning and development risk and even the determinants and interpretation of yields.

Interviews in Scotland and England suggested that the barriers did not really differentiate between Scotland and elsewhere in the UK. There is evidence of yields approaching the investment level, of demand in Edinburgh and potentially also in Glasgow and Aberdeen. However, UK investors will demand evidence of success first but may yet stall investment in the absence of the perceived scale required which may not be forthcoming outside of London and major English cities.

Third, what’s to be done?

• Land, probably in mixed tenure developments, is required for new build and land for rented housing needs to be identified in local plans and perhaps in some cases exempted from S75 conditions. English policies have covenanted land, often public land, so that it remains in long term private renting.
• Development finance is often an important market failure and may require something like the Build to Rent fund partnership with the State to overcome it.
• Intermediaries will be required to aggregate up providers so that they match the minimum scale requirements of investors.
• Investors are looking for a guaranteed income stream, especially as the market is in its early stages – the UK Government’s guarantee scheme for the PRS only applies to debt reducing cost but not addressing the need for secure income.
• Management costs in Scotland appear to be relatively high, professional management is scarce and housing associations would have to learn to work in a quite different setting.

Fourth, the report made a number of specific recommendations. While there is no magic bullet in the form of a single financial model that seems workable without subsidy, guarantee or state-led partnership participation, it may be possible that a few practical steps might encourage the basis for developers and institutions to work together effectively. These would include: promoting a champion of the sector who would work with key stakeholders, trade bodies and government; explaining what the sector requires; supporting pilots and seeking to strengthen the environment that would encourage investment while at the same time encouraging innovation and experiment (there are 20 recommendations in all in the full report).

Reflecting on the wider questions, it seems to me that the current controversy over short tenancy length and calls for more regulation miss the point – the rental market is highly varied and the need for raising the floor of standards and protecting tenants at the bottom should not undermine the quality end of the rental market that purpose built institution-funded rental property would seek to promote. There is a challenge for policy to find ways to improve the quality of the poorer end of the market without dissuading the increasing interest in investment in different higher quality market rental segments. We all know the sector is split up into distinct sub markets – can we not facilitate regulation that recognises these differences? Wouldn’t a strong housing association role as a managing agent help do this as well as diversify their income base and promote the reputation of the market segment?

There is institutional investment taking place in London despite the lack of information transparency. There is demand in Scottish cities. There appears to be growth in interest from a range of investment funds in general. Will it be tapped this time? Will the pump-priming of subsidy and finance form Government make enough of a difference to support a self-sustaining market sector of new well managed housing? Perhaps it will in London but like the report says, much else has to be done to help support the rental market quality enhancement – and of course much resistance in Scotland remains in certain quarters. We are at a critical juncture.

New International Evidence on Policies to Stabilize Housing Markets

Fresh from David Miles intervention on equity loans discussed in my previous post, Tony O’Sullivan forwarded me another paper that I want to share with you. This is a new econometric study (November 2013) for the Bank of International Settlements by Kenneth Kuttner and Ilhyock Shim (BIS Working Paper 433) entitled: ‘Can non-interest rate policies stabilise housing markets? Evidence from a panel of 57 economies’.

The authors start from the generally held position that interest rates are a blunt instrument that often need to go up so high that they tip the economy into recession before they can bring the housing market to heel. Hence the search for other non-interest-based policy tools that might moderate and ‘tame’ the housing market.

Like Miles’ paper, this is closely related to the literature on macro-prudential policy that seeks to ‘limit systemic risk in the financial system as a whole’ (p.2) and to a growing series of papers on policy tools other than short run interest rates with which to stabilize housing markets (they identify such papers since 2005 – see footnote below).

The authors assemble a powerful panel data set covering 57 countries employing quarterly data from 1980 to 2011, which allows them to consider a series of policy interventions in different housing markets.  The authors focus on nine policy areas, grouped around three headings:

1. General credit policies

• Reserve requirements (the percentage of liabilities that have to be held as liquid reserves).
• Liquidity requirements (the ratio of highly liquid assets to total liabilities).
• Limits on general credit growth.

2. Housing-targeted specific credit policies

• Maximum LTV (sets a ceiling on housing loans).
• Maximum DSTI (debt service to income ratio).
• Reserve and liquidity requirements specific to housing credit.
• Limiting bank housing exposure as percentage of total assets/liabilities.
• Increasing the bank’s risk weight for housing (making it more expensive to extend housing loans for a given amount of bank equity – p.11).

3. Housing-related tax policies

• A range of taxes and subsidies that reduce house purchase costs – wealth and capital taxes, stamp duty, direct subsidy and tax deductions, etc. This is conceived of as ways of changing the user cost of capital.

Cutting to the chase, having undertaken a series of cross-checking tests of the robustness of their results through techniques including panel regressions and sophisticated forecasting models known as event studies (which were new to me), the authors report findings of policy impacts with respect to both housing credit and house prices.

They find that many of the policy instruments studied are not effective but that housing credit constraints in the form of tightening debt service to income ratios do make a difference in statistical significance terms. They find that a small tightening in the ratio can ‘decelerate credit’ by 4-7% over the following year. Loan to value ceilings also had a significant effect on credit but are sensitive to the statistical model specification used. The other striking effect the authors found looking at policy effects on house prices (the only statistically significant factor) was that housing-related tax increases lead to a measurable fall in house prices (i.e. a small increase in housing taxes leading to a 2-3% reduction in house price growth – though this was not symmetric and did not reverse it though a reduction in housing taxes).

The authors recognise that their models has been applied to more than 50 different economies at different stages of economic development, income levels and institutions.  The results need, despite their exhaustive testing, to be treated with caution.  Average effects may wash out in certain circumstances and in others imply strong effects. The point, however, is that there are important negative findings – increasing the supply of general credit has little measurable impact on housing credit and credit policies do not seem to affect house prices. At the same time, housing credit policies based around the key debt servicing ratio and housing tax-related policies do seem to have a market impact.

The authors conclude that this is a promising basis for further research to understand how policy effectiveness is influenced by more narrow legal, financial and housing market institutions and structures (p.26).

This is an interesting paper, which makes a sterling effort to wrestle with a range of policy interventions across a range of national housing systems. Of course, there are genuine difficulties in interpreting just what results from such a wide range of countries mean and what average effects imply for a specific system such as that of the UK. But, for all that, the clarity of the negative results and the positive indicative ones suggesting market-moderating roles for taxation and for a debt servicing ratio ceiling/credit constraint – are certainly intriguing.

What will the Bank of England make of this research?  It should certainly note that many of the tried and tested measures may have less impact on the housing market than they may have anticipated but that there are some promising candidates, too. It is intuitive that more tailored housing-specific policies may be more effective but it is also salutary that many even of these instruments may not make much difference to the housing market. Like the authors of the study, the Bank should take this and related work and think through its relationship to UK markets and institutions. I think also that it is encouraging evidence, even if somewhat limited, for all of us who want to construct and implement tailored interventions that can promote more stability in the housing market.

Footnote

Selected housing policy references in the Kuttner and Shim working paper:

Borio, C  and Shim, I (2007) ‘What can (macro-)Prudential Policy do to support monetary policy?’ BIS working paper 242.

Claessens, S, S Ghosh and R Mihet (2013): “Macro-prudential policies to mitigate financial system vulnerabilities”, Journal of International Money and Finance, forthcoming.

Crowe, C, G Dell’Ariccia, D Igan and P Rabanal (2011): “How to deal with real estate booms: lessons from country experiences”, IMF Working Paper 11/91

Hilbers, P, I Otker-Robe, C Pazarbasioglu and G Johnsen (2005): “Assessing and managing rapid credit growth and the role of supervisory and prudential policies”, IMF Working Paper 05/151.

Lim, C H, F Columba, A Costa, P Kongsamut, A Otani, M Saiyid, T Wezel and X Wu (2011): “Macroprudential policy: what instruments and how to use them? Lessons from country experiences”, IMF Working Paper 11/238

Shim, I, B Bogdanova, J Shek and A Subelyte (2013): “Database for policy actions on housing markets”, BIS Quarterly Review, September, pp 83–95.

Housing Market Instability, Equity Loans and the Wider Economy

I was going to write about something else today but then my wife forwarded me the speech made yesterday by David Miles, member of MPC of the Bank of England, at a conference in Dallas. His paper ‘Housing, leverage and stability in the wider economy’ has been press-released by the Bank of England [1]. His paper speaks to the capacity of central banks to help reduce leveraged debt in the housing market and thereby reduce housing market ‘turbulence’ in the wider economy. High leverage e.g. a 5% down-payment can leave owners highly exposed to small falls in house prices, let alone adverse movements in interest rates). This also speaks to earlier discussion regarding controlling house price volatility and the furore around the possible wider impacts of Help to Buy 2 and whether house prices ought to be an explicit target to be monitored and indeed intervened against by the Bank.

The argument in the paper is as follows (p.2): ‘I want to consider some of the policies – including monetary policy – that might be used to reduce the risks of turbulence in the housing market causing widespread damage. I will argue that one factor is particularly significant…leverage: that is the fact that houses are bought with such a high proportion of debt. In that context, I consider the advantages of (and obstacles to) greater use of outside equity in financing house purchase’.

His point is that the classical tool of market management, interest rates, is at best a blunt instrument. And of course the user cost of capital (broadly – interest rates minus expected house price gains) may be negative and unless one believes house price change makes up an unfeasibly large share of the CPI, a more housing/mortgage target set of policy instruments will be required. This will be particularly so according to Miles where the level of interest rates required to bring stability to the housing market are not those required in the interest of the wider economy – a classic case of too few policy tools.

So what is to be done? He repeats the recent Bank line that a ‘range of macro-prudential policy levers could be used to mitigate risks to financial stability emanating from housing markets, graduating from more intensive supervision…through variations in capital requirements on mortgage lending to limits on loan to income and loan to value ratios (p.8)’ (though the Governor viewed the latter as voluntary exhortation in recent pronouncements).

The paper by David Miles considers how to seek to reduce the proportion of home purchase that is debt and thereby reduce leverage and the instability, risk and exposure associated with it – by increasing the level of equity. How so?

A first way would be to use greater use of individual equity through lower LTV ceilings which if enforceable would of course increase the period required to save and the average age of first time buyers would remain high.

Alternatively, Miles suggests some form of outside equity or equity-like funding sharing the risk between the owner-occupier and the outside provider of funding. Such things, he points out have been looked at before in Australia, the UK and the USA (e.g. equity loan finance wherein the owner retains rights over all of the property unlike shared ownership).

The scope for developing this area further has been widely discussed by academics like Christine Whitehead, Judy Yates and other colleagues at Cambridge’s CCHPR.  In fact HTB1 looks very like such a risk-sharing device where the lender receives nothing for five years prior to a regular payment before recouping (hopefully) at sale. As Miles points out, in these cases the equity loan provider shares the risk of property price falls as well as the opportunity of sharing appreciation.

The UK is fortunate in not having tax relief on mortgage interest for home owning mortgage debt as this would, as David Miles correctly notes, act as a disincentive to reducing debt via equity loans (since deductibility depends directly on debt size). Moreover, Miles argues that even a small equity loan stake would have a major impact on leverage if home owners can provide an element of home equity themselves. His example in the conclusion of his paper is that a 10% down payment by the borrower subsequently augmented by a 20% equity loan changes the leverage ratio from 10 to 3.333 (plus the cumulative affordability saving by having lower repayments on a smaller mortgage).

The big question is how to create a successful market in equity loans, in effect, providing a private sector version of HTB1? Other questions are – should it be national or regional, should it be targeted to first time buyers and should it have ‘affordable’ ceilings placed on purchase prices? How do we encourage banks and other equity investors to tie up scarce capital in this way?

David’s paper is in effect it seems to me to be saying that the BoE’s macro prudential and monetary policy measures can influence leverage but that a promotion of an equity loan market for home owners of 10-20% of value could, on an incentive-compatible basis, share risk and significantly reduce leverage and the wider problems that go with it. He recognises that establishing such a market will not be easy: ‘various shared equity products in the past (most of which were not equity loans) have a patchy success rate. But the recently launched equity loan product provided by the UK government for those buying newly built homes (under its Help to Buy scheme) has proved popular (pp.17-18)’.

All in all, an interesting discussion – a possibly larger role for Equity Loans for macro deleveraging reasons though big questions remain as to how to establish and then make such a market work. It is good to see that prominent thinkers on the MPC are encouraging debate even if they are on the one had writing in a personal capacity but, at the same time, being press-released by the Bank. As usual it is difficult to tell how much internal consensus there is about this direction of travel.

[1] http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Pages/news/2013/132.aspx