Macroblog

June 9, 2016

It’s Not Just Millennials Who Aren't Buying Homes

In recent years, much attention has been focused on the growing tendency of millennials to rent. Theories for the decrease in homeownership among young adults abound. They include rising student debt levels that crowd out additional borrowing, a tendency to live in more urban areas where the cost to buy is relatively high, a generally tougher credit environment, and even shifts in the perception of homeownership in the wake of the housing bust. The ideas have been widely debated, and yet no single factor seems to neatly explain the declining share of the millennial population opting to buy a house. (See this webcast by the Atlanta Fed's Center for Real Estate Analytics for a discussion of these issues.)

To the extent that these factors are true, they may be affecting the decisions of other generations as well. Chart 1 below shows the overall average homeownership rate and homeownership rates by age group from 1982 to 2015. It's clear that homeownership rates have declined for everyone during the past 10 years, not just for millennials.

In fact, homeownership among young Generation Xers has fallen by a bit more than the millennial generation since the housing peak—declining 11 percentage points since 2005 compared with a decline of 9 percentage points for those under 35 years old.

Another interesting point of comparison is the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, a period in which the United States had a relatively stable share of owner-occupied housing of around 64.0 percent. During the subsequent housing boom, the homeownership rate climbed to a peak of 69 percent in 2004, only to fall back down to 63.7 percent in 2015, a level similar to that prevailing before 1995. However, each age group under age 65 has a somewhat lower homeownership rate than their same-aged peers had during the 1986–94 period.

The fact that the average U.S. homeownership rate is close to rates seen in the mid-1980s and mid-1990s while homeownership rates within age groups (under 65) are currently lower than their respective averages in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s suggests that factors other than age may be affecting the average person's decision to buy or rent.

To investigate what else may be going on, charts 2 and 3 show homeownership rates by family type and race. Between 2005 and 2015, the trend mirrors what's happening by age group. The tendency to own a home has been falling for all family types and races over the past decade. In general, economic incentives (or cultural attitudes) appear to have shifted the population toward renting and away from buying.

However, the picture is quite different when you compare homeownership rates by family type and race to the pre-1995 period. While homeownership rates within age groups are generally lower today, married couples, one-person households, and nonmarried, multiperson households were all more likely to own their home in 2015. Homeownership rates across race (except for blacks) were also higher in 2015 than in 1994.

So how do we interpret the fact that the overall homeownership rate is close to its average in the 1986 to 1994 period? Are millennials to blame? Yes. But so is everyone else under the age of 65. The data suggest that whatever is affecting millennials' homeownership decisions is applicable to older individuals as well. Further, it seems there are other, possibly larger, factors affecting homeownership, such as the changing face of America. Although homeownership rates by family types and racial groups are a bit above the level seen in 1994, the average person in 2015 was about as likely to live in a home that is owned or being bought. Thus, the shift in the distribution of the population toward racial groups and family types (and likely other factors) that tend to have lower homeownership rates is likely exerting an important influence on the overall homeownership rate.

Ellyn Terry, an economic policy analysis specialist in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• June 9, 2016 in
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  • Real Estate
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August 1, 2014

What's behind Housing's June Swoon?

The housing market appears to have endured a particularly cruel month in June. Fairly good numbers on existing home sales provided some antidote to a second consecutive monthly decline in housing starts and a sharp decline in new home sales. But that palliative is less comforting than it might otherwise be given the fact that existing sales were still 2.3 percent below the June 2013 rate, and budding optimism diminished further with this week's unexpected drop off in the pace of pending home sales.

In her recent remarks before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs and before the House Committee on Financial Services, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen took particular note of ongoing weakness in residential real estate:

The housing sector, however, has shown little recent progress. While this sector has recovered notably from its earlier trough, housing activity leveled off in the wake of last year's increase in mortgage rates, and readings this year have, overall, continued to be disappointing.

The statement following the conclusion of this week's meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee provided an exclamation point to Chair Yellen's commentary:

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that ... recovery in the housing sector remains slow.

The housing market was a bright spot in the economy from early 2012 to mid-2013, and there's no shortage of conjecture on why it has morphed into a source of concern. Reasonable hypotheses include reduced affordability brought on by higher mortgage rates and real estate prices, tighter lending conditions and ongoing balance sheet issues for households (think student debt), and supply constraints associated with rising construction costs and lot availability (at least in the most desirable locations, as examples here and here discuss).

In a March post in the Atlanta Fed's SouthPoint, affordability issues—specifically, interest rates and prices—constituted two of the top three explanations given by our broker and builder contacts in the Southeast for recent slower growth in the housing market. Earlier, we had examined the affordability issue in an Atlanta Fed Real Estate Research post. In it, we decomposed the affordability index that the National Association of Realtors (NAR) produces each month. We used our decomposition to show that the rebound in housing prices in 2012 served as a huge drag on affordability and, after six years of contributing to affordability, mortgage interest rates became a drag in mid-2013.

How—and why—has the affordability index changed since we last checked? The chart below provides an update through May 2014 (the latest date for which we have the data necessary for our decomposition):

(enlarge)

On a year-over-year basis, affordability has fallen as a result of rising prices and last summer's uptick in interest rates. Still, affordability remains high by precrisis standards. And given that we have recently passed the anniversary of the first "taper talk," the impact of the interest rate component should fade if rates remain stable and thus become similar to, if not below, year-ago levels. Likewise, house price growth has decelerated and will continue to be less of a drag on affordability as measured by NAR.

It may be fair to attribute some of the recent softness in housing to affordability. But in light of the still relatively high readings of our index, it seems likely that the main culprits are one or more of the other factors discussed above.

By Carl Hudson, director of the Atlanta Fed's Center for Real Estate Analytics, and

Jessica Dill, senior economic research analyst in the Atlanta Fed's research department

• August 1, 2014 in
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  • Real Estate
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October 18, 2013

Why Was the Housing-Price Collapse So Painful? (And Why Is It Still?)

Foresight about the disaster to come was not the primary reason this year’s Nobel Prize in economics went to Robert Shiller (jointly with Eugene Fama and Lars Hansen). But Professor Shiller’s early claim that a housing-price bubble was full on, and his prediction that trouble was a-comin’, is arguably the primary source of his claim to fame in the public sphere.

Several years down the road, the causes and effects of the housing-price run-up, collapse, and ensuing financial crisis are still under the microscope. Consider, for example, this opinion by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research:

...the downturn is not primarily a “financial crisis.” The story of the downturn is a simple story of a collapsed housing bubble. The $8 trillion housing bubble was driving demand in the U.S. economy in the last decade until it collapsed in 2007. When the bubble burst we lost more than 4 percentage points of GDP worth of demand due to a plunge in residential construction. We lost roughly the same amount of demand due to a falloff in consumption associated with the disappearance of $8 trillion in housing wealth.

The collapse of the bubble created a hole in annual demand equal to 8 percent of GDP, which would be $1.3 trillion in today’s economy. The central problem facing the U.S., the euro zone, and the U.K. was finding ways to fill this hole.

In part, Baker’s post relates to an ongoing pundit catfight, which Baker himself concedes is fairly uninteresting. As he says, “What matters is the underlying issues of economic policy.” Agreed, and in that light I am skeptical about dismissing the centrality of the financial crisis to the story of the downturn and, perhaps more important, to the tepid recovery that has followed.

Interpreting what Baker has in mind is important, so let me start there. I have not scoured Baker’s writings for pithy hyperlinks, but I assume that his statement cited above does not deny that the immediate post-Lehman period is best characterized as a period of panic leading to severe stress in financial markets. What I read is his assertion that the basic problem—perhaps outside the crisis period in late 2008—is a rather plain-vanilla drop in wealth that has dramatically suppressed consumer demand, and with it economic growth. An assertion that the decline in wealth is what led us into the recession, is what accounts for the depth and duration of the recession, and is what’s responsible for the shallow recovery since.

With respect to the pace of recovery, evidence supports the proposition that financial crises without housing busts are not so unique—or if they are, the data tend to associate financial-related downturns with stronger-than-average recoveries. Mike Bordo and Joe Haubrich, respectively from Rutgers University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, argue that the historical record of U.S. recessions leads us to view housing and the pace of residential investment as the key to whether tepid recoveries will follow sharp recessions:

Our analysis of the data shows that steep expansions tend to follow deep contractions, though this depends heavily on when the recovery is measured. In contrast to much conventional wisdom, the stylized fact that deep contractions breed strong recoveries is particularly true when there is a financial crisis. In fact, on average, it is cycles without a financial crisis that show the weakest relation between contraction depth and recovery strength. For many configurations, the evidence for a robust bounce-back is stronger for cycles with financial crises than those without...

Our results also suggest that a sizeable fraction of the shortfall of the present recovery from the average experience of recoveries after deep recessions is due to the collapse of residential investment.

From here, however, it gets trickier to reach conclusions about why changes in housing values are so important. Simply put, why should there be a “wealth effect” at all? If the price of my house falls and I suffer a capital loss, I do in fact feel less wealthy. But all potential buyers of my house just gained the opportunity to obtain my house at a lower price. For them, the implied wealth gain is the same as my loss. If buyers and sellers essentially behave the same way, why should there be a large impact on consumption? *

I think this notion quickly leads you to the thought there is something fundamentally special about housing assets and that this special role relates to credit markets and finance. This angle is clearly articulated in these passages from a Bloomberg piece earlier in the year, one of a spate of articles in the spring about why rapidly recovering house prices were apparently not driving the recovery into a higher gear:

The wealth effect from rising house prices may not be as effective as it once was in spurring the U.S. economy...

The wealth effect “is much smaller,” said Amir Sufi, professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Sufi, who participated in last year’s central-bank conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, reckons that each dollar increase in housing wealth may yield as little as an extra cent in spending. That compares with a 3-to-5-cent estimate by economists prior to the recession.

Many homeowners are finding they can’t refinance their mortgages because banks have tightened credit conditions so much they’re not eligible for new loans. Most who can refinance are opting not to withdraw equity after the first nationwide decline in house prices since the Great Depression reminded them home values can fall as well as rise...

Others are finding it difficult to refinance because credit has become a lot harder to come by. And that situation could worsen as banks respond to stepped-up government oversight.

“Credit is going to get tighter before it gets easier,” said David Stevens, president and chief executive officer of the Washington-based Mortgage Bankers Association...

“Households that have been through foreclosure or have underwater mortgages or are otherwise credit-constrained are less able than other households to take advantage” of low interest rates, Fed Governor Sarah Bloom Raskin said in an April 18 speech in New York.

(I should note that Sufi et al. previously delved into the relationship between household balance sheets and the economic downturn here.)

A more systematic take comes from the Federal Reserve Board’s Matteo Iacoviello:

Empirically, housing wealth and consumption tend to move together: this could happen because some third factor moves both variables, or because there is a more direct effect going from one variable to the other. Studies based on time-series data, on panel data and on more detailed, recent micro data point suggest that a considerable portion of the effect of housing wealth on consumption reflects the influence of changes in housing wealth on borrowing against such wealth.

That sounds like a financial problem to me and, in the spirit of Baker’s plea that it is the policy that matters, this distinction is more than semantic. The policy implications of an economic shock that alters the capacity to engage in borrowing and lending are not necessarily the same as those that result from a straightforward decline in wealth.

Having said that, it is not so clear how the policy implications are different. One possibility is that diminished access to credit markets also weakens policy-transmission mechanisms, calling for even more aggressive demand-oriented “pump-priming” policies of the sort Dean Baker advocates. But it is also possible that we have entered a period of deep structural repair that only time (and not merely government stimulus) can (or should) engineer: deleveraging and balance sheet repair, sectoral resource reallocation, new consumption habits, new business models driven by both market and regulatory imperatives, you name it.

In my view, it’s not yet clear which policy approach is closest to optimal. But I am fairly well convinced that good judgment will require us to think of the past decade as the financial event it was, and in many ways still is.

*Update: A colleague pointed out that my example describing housing price changes and wealth effects may be simplified to the point of being misleading. Implicitly, I am in fact assuming that the flow of housing services derived from housing assets is fixed, a condition that obviously would not hold in general. See section 3 of the Iacoviello paper cited above for a theoretical description of why, to a first approximation, we would not expect there to be a large consumption effect from changes in housing values.

By Dave Altig, executive vice president and research director at the Atlanta Fed

• October 18, 2013 in
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  • Housing
  • Pricing
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March 11, 2013

You Say You’re a Homeowner and Not a Renter? Think Again.

As we’ve said before, we’re suckers for cool charts. The latest that caught our eye is the following one, originally created by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). It highlights the relative importance assigned to the various components of the consumer price index (CPI) and shows where increases in the index have come from over the past 12 months.

It probably won’t surprise anyone that the drop in gasoline prices (found in the transportation component) exerted downward pressure on the CPI last year, while the cost of medical care pushed the price index higher. What might surprise you is the size of that big, blue square labeled “housing.” Housing accounts for a little more than 40 percent of the CPI market basket and, given its weight, any change in this component significantly affects the overall index.

This begs the question: In light of the recent strength seen in the housing market—and notably the nearly 10 percent rise in home prices over the past 12 months—are housing costs likely to exert more upward pressure on the CPI?

Before we dive into this question, it’s important to understand that home prices do not directly enter into the computation of the CPI (or the personal consumption expenditures [PCE] price index, for that matter). This is because a home is an asset, and an increase in its value does not impose a “cost” on the homeowner. But there is a cost that homeowners face in addition to home maintenance and utilities, and that’s the implied rent they incur by living in their home rather than renting it out. In effect, every homeowner is his or her own tenant, and the rent they forgo each month is called the “owners’ equivalent rent” (or OER) in the CPI. OER represents about 24 percent of the CPI (and about 11 percent of the PCE price index). The CPI captures this OER cost (sensibly, in our view) by measuring the cost of home rentals (details here). So whether the robust rise in home prices will influence the behavior of the CPI this year depends on whether rising home prices influence home rents.

So what is likely to happen to OER given the continued increase in home prices? Well, higher home prices, in time, ought to cause home rents to rise, putting upward pressure on the CPI. Homes are assets to landlords, after all, and landlords (like all investors) require an adequate return on their investments. Let’s call this the “asset market influence” of home prices on home rents. But the rents that landlords charge also compete with homeownership. If renters decide to become homeowners, the rental market loses customers, which should push home rents in the opposite direction of home prices for a time. Let’s call this the “substitution influence” on rent prices.

Consider the following charts, which show three-month home prices and home rents (measured by the CPI’s OER measure). It’s a little hard to see a clear correlation between these two measures.

So we’ve separated these data into their trend and cycle components (using Hodrick-Prescott procedures, if you must know) shown in the following two charts. Now, if one takes the trend view, there is a clear positive relationship between home prices and home rents. This is consistent with the asset market influence described above. But also consider the detrended perspective. Here, home prices and home rents are pretty clearly negatively correlated. This, to us, looks like the substitution influence described above.

So let’s get back to the question at hand. What do rising home prices mean for OER and, ultimately, the behavior of the CPI? Well, it’s rather hard to say because the link between home prices and OER isn’t particularly strong.

Not definitive enough for you? OK, how about this: We think the recent rise in home prices will more likely lean against the rise in OER for the near term as the growing demand for home ownership provides some competition to the rental market. But, in time, these influences will give way to the asset market fundamentals, and rents are likely to accelerate as returns on real estate investments are reaffirmed.

By Mike Bryan, vice president and senior economist, and



Nick Parker, economic research analyst, both in the Atlanta Fed’s research department

• March 11, 2013 in
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  • macroeconomics
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