Tag: Housing market

The keys to house price growth

Arno Hantzsche and Harriet Jeanes

Houses account for the largest share of total assets held by the UK household sector. Households’ spending and saving decisions depend in part on the price of these assets. What causes house prices to move can therefore have important consequences for macroeconomic policy and financial stability. Our house price model decomposes movements in house prices into contributions from key economic drivers. Among these, measures of real household income explain much of their variation over time. The rise in mortgage rates during the recent tightening cycle is estimated to have kept house prices nearly 10% lower than had interest rates not moved, with some of this effect offset by real income growth.

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The effects of subsidised flood insurance on real estate markets

Nicola Garbarino, Benjamin Guin and Jonathan Lee

5.2 million properties in England are at risk of flooding. To ensure the availability and affordability of flood insurance to households in flood-prone areas, the UK Government introduced an innovative reinsurance scheme, Flood Re, in April 2016. It provides insurers with an option to pass the flood-risk element of their policies on to the reinsurer at a lower fixed price according to property council tax band. In a recently published Staff Working Paper, we employ a granular data set of all property transactions and flood events in England. We estimate the effect of Flood Re on property values. We also explore if Flood Re effects are heterogeneous across different subpopulations in England.

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Location, location, location? How UK housing preferences shifted during the pandemic

Martina Fazio and Gary Harper

During recessions, and indeed pandemics, housing prices usually fall. Yet between March 2020 and December 2021 (‘the pandemic’), housing prices grew in the UK, reaching at the time their highest growth rate in a decade. During this pandemic, many more people could work from home, which potentially influenced their housing choices. In a recent Financial Stability paper, we analyse how changes in peoples’ preferences might have played into house price growth. We find that about half the growth in housing prices was linked to shifts in preferences. This was mostly due to an increased premium paid for houses over flats, with changes in location preferences only contributing marginally. But other interventions and macroeconomic factors also affected housing price growth.

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Housing consumption and investment: evidence from the Help to Buy scheme

Matteo Benetton, Philippe Bracke, João F Cocco and Nicola Garbarino

Academics have made the case for mortgage products with equity features, so that gains and losses due to fluctuations in house values are shared between the household and an outside investor. In theory, the equity component expands the set of affordable properties, without increasing household debt, and default risk. These products have not become mainstream, but in a recent paper, we study a large UK experiment with equity-based housing finance — the Help To Buy Equity Loan scheme. We find that equity loans are mainly used to overcome credit constraints, rather than to reduce investment risk. Unconstrained household prefer mortgage debt over equity loans, suggesting optimism about house price risk. Equity loans could still contribute to house price inflation: we don’t find evidence that houses purchased with equity loans are overpriced, but an assessment of the aggregate effects is beyond the scope of the paper.

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Bitesize: The rise and fall of interest only mortgages

Sachin Galaiya

The interest-only product has undergone tremendous evolution, from its mass-market glory days in the run-up to the crisis, to its rebirth as a niche product. However, since reaching a low-point in 2016, the interest-only market is starting to show signs of life again as lenders re-enter the market.

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History dependence in the housing market

Philippe Bracke and Silvana Tenreyro.

When someone bought a house turns out to be an important factor in predicting whether the house will be sold again soon, and at what price. People who bought during a boom aim at achieving higher prices when they sell and, as a consequence, move less often. We explore whether this pattern is due to psychological anchoring (whereby the previous purchase price becomes an important reference point) or to the way the mortgage market works (for example, with homebuyers often using proceeds from house sales for down-payments on new properties).

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Bitesize: How 20-somethings are getting onto the housing ladder in London

Sachin Galaiya.

There are two ways people can make their resources go further when buying a home.

One is to increase the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio and hence increase the amount available to buy a house for a given deposit.

The other is to lengthen the term over which the mortgage is repaid, which increases the size of loan associated with a given level of monthly repayments.

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Houses: who has stopped buying them?

Lizzie Drapper and Hasdeep Sethi.

In 2006, 64 English houses in every 1000 changed hands. Three years and a credit crunch later, this had halved to only 32 transactions per 1000 houses. Since 2009, transactions have recovered, but remain well below their pre-crisis level (Chart 1). Transactions are a key metric of the health of the UK housing market and can be seen as a measure of “liquidity”. The reasons behind low transactions levels may also provide further insight into people’s behaviour and view of housing in the UK. In the work set out below, we conclude that it is unlikely that transactions regain their pre-crisis level any time soon, because of affordability constraints for first-time buyers and fewer discretionary moves by existing owners.

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