March 29, 2024

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Housing bubble signs brewing

Housing bubble signs brewing
Home prices are rising faster than market forces suggest they should be “disconnected from the basics,” according to one New blog post Written by researchers and economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
Until recently, the possibility of a bubble It was not widely supported. But after looking at housing markets across the US, Federal Reserve researchers said new evidence is emerging.

“Our evidence points to abnormal behavior in the US housing market for the first time since the boom of the early 2000s,” the researchers wrote. “The reasons for concern are evident in some of the economic indicators… which are showing signs that home prices in 2021 appear increasingly out of line with fundamentals.”

Many Americans are still reeling from the last housing crash in 2007, which was prompted by cheap credit and lax lending standards that left millions of homeowners owing more than they’re worth.

But this time economists said they are concerned about a different scenario.

Just because housing prices are going up doesn’t always mean housing is in a bubble. There are plenty of reasons why home prices have risen steadily over the past decade – and have risen even more in the past two years – including imbalances in market demand and supply, rising labor and construction costs and how high or low they are. The researchers noted that mortgage interest rates.

But, they said, prices could rise to a point they call “glut”, as prices increasingly become out of line with the economic fundamentals that underpin the market.

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One possible reason, they suggested, is that buyers may believe prices will continue to rise and fear that they will miss the opportunity to get a lower price for a home now and stumble on paying more later.

This fear of missing out, or the FOMO effect, can lead to higher prices and increase expectations for higher prices in the future. This could create a self-fulfilling prophecy, the researchers said, in which price growth could become exponential.

The consequences of a glut in the housing market can include expensive homes, investments based on distorted expectations of returns, and lower economic growth and jobs.

The cycle is interrupted when policymakers step in, prompting investors to be cautious and drying up the flow of money into housing. This could cause a housing correction or possibly even a collapse, according to the blog post.

The researchers recommended that policy makers and market participants monitor local markets closely for price spikes in order to better respond, “before the deviations become so severe that subsequent corrections lead to economic disruption.”

Bubble fermentation

The researchers noted that the behavior of home buyers and sellers over the past two years has not been at all normal. Prices are at record levels And keep going up due to record low stocks. Homebuyers are still buying. interest rates It fell to record levels during the pandemic, but that alone doesn’t explain the housing market madness, they wrote.
Fed researchers wrote that other factors played a role in pushing the market into bubble territory, including Pandemic stimulus programs and Covid-19 related supply chain disruptions and associated policy responses. The researchers specifically highlight the role of investors, who are aggressive homebuyers.
Investors now buy 33% of homes in the United States, a 5% larger share than the average over the past decade, according to John Burns, a real estate consultancy. Action i buy — in which a company buys a home for cash to fix it up a bit and resell it again — represented just 1.7% of the national housing market in the last quarter of 2021, according to Zillow. But in some cities, the percentage of home buyers owned is as high as 11%.

The researchers found that as prices rose, signs of abundance appeared. They found that the US housing market showed these signs for more than five consecutive quarters through the third quarter of 2021.

Federal Reserve researchers also looked at the relationship between home prices and rentals. They found that since 2020, the home-to-rent ratio has risen far beyond what market fundamentals can explain, and signs of exuberance are beginning to appear in 2021.

Another indicator the researchers examined is the ratio of home prices to disposable income, which is closely related to affordability. The home-price-to-income ratio is increasing rapidly, but it is not yet abundant, the researchers said.

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Much has been learned from the recent collapse in the housing sector, the researchers wrote, improving early detection and warning indicators of housing bubbles. If these worrying trends continue, banks, policy makers and regulators must be better equipped to respond quickly to avoid the negative and more dangerous consequences of a correction.

In addition, they wrote, there is no reason to expect that any resulting correction will affect homeowners or the economy as massively as the recent collapse in the housing sector. Americans are generally in better financial shape, homeowners have stronger stock positions, and excessive borrowing isn’t as rampant as it was in the mid-2000s.