105 posts on "Housing"
February 14, 2018
Landing a Jumbo Is Getting Easier
Andreas Fuster, James Vickery, and Akhtar Shah The United States relies heavily on securitization for funding residential mortgages. But for institutional reasons, large mortgages, or “jumbos,” are more difficult to securitize, and are instead usually held as whole loans by banks. How does this structure affect the pricing and availability of jumbo mortgages? In this […]
February 13, 2018
Just Released: Great Recession’s Impact Lingers in Hardest‑Hit Regions
The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data today released our Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the fourth quarter of 2017. Along with this report, we have posted an update of state-level data on balances and delinquencies for 2017. Overall aggregate debt balances increased again, with growth in all types of balances except for home equity lines of credit. In our post on the first quarter of 2017 we reported that overall balances had surpassed their peak set in the third quarter of 2008—the result of a slow but steady climb from several years of sharp deleveraging during the Great Recession.
Posted at 11:00 am in Credit, Household Finance, Housing, Recession, Regional Analysis | Permalink | Comments (2)
August 23, 2017
At the New York Fed: The Appropriate Government Role in U.S. Mortgage Markets
While the U.S. mortgage finance system was at the center of the recent financial crisis, it remains largely untouched by legislative reforms. At the center of these conversations are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—both of which were placed into federal conservatorship in September 2008.
April 3, 2017
Diplomas to Doorsteps: Education, Student Debt, and Homeownership
Evidence overwhelmingly shows that the average earnings premium to having a college education is high and has risen over the past several decades, in part because of a decline in real average earnings for those without a college degree.
March 29, 2017
QE Frictions: Could Banks Have Favored Refinancing over New Purchase Borrowing?
Quantitative easing (QE)—the Fed Reserve’s effort to provide policy accommodation lowering long-term interest rates at a time when the federal funds rate as near its lower bound—has generated a great deal of research, both about its impact and about the frictions that might limit that impact.
March 27, 2017
Being Up Front about the FHA’s Up‑Front Mortgage Insurance Premiums
The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) played a significant role in maintaining mortgage credit availability following the onset of the subprime mortgage crisis and through the Great Recession.
February 17, 2017
A Close Look at the Decline of Homeownership
The homeownership rate—the percentage of households that own rather than rent the homes that they live in—has fallen sharply since mid-2005. In fact, in the second quarter of 2016 the homeownership rate fell to 62.9 percent, its lowest level since 1965. In this blog post, we look at underlying demographic trends to gain a deeper understanding of the large increase in the homeownership rate from 1995 to 2005 and the subsequent large decline. Although there is reason to believe that the homeownership rate may begin to rise again in the not-too-distant future, it is unlikely to fully recover to its previous peak levels. This is a disconcerting finding for those who view homeownership as an integral part of the American Dream and a key component of income security during retirement.
February 16, 2017
The Homeownership Gap Is Finally Closing
The homeownership rate peaked at 69 percent in late 2004. By the summer of 2016, it had dropped below 63 percent—exactly where it was when the government started reporting these data back in 1965.
February 15, 2017
Houses as ATMs No Longer
Housing equity is the primary form of collateral that households use for borrowing. This makes it a potentially important source of consumption funding, especially for younger households. In a previous post we showed that owner’s equity in residential real estate has finally, thanks to increasing home prices, rebounded to and essentially re-attained its 2005 peak level. Yet in spite of a gain of more than $7 trillion in housing equity since 2012, so far homeowners haven’t been tapping this equity at anything like the pace we witnessed during the housing boom that ended in 2006. In this post, we analyze the changes in equity withdrawal.
February 14, 2017
The Evolution of Home Equity Ownership
In yesterday’s post, we discussed the extreme swings that household leverage has taken since 2005, using combined loan-to-value (CLTV) ratios for housing as our metric. We also explored the risks that current household leverage presents in the event of a significant downturn in prices. Today we reverse the perspective, and consider housing equity—the value of housing net of all debt for which it serves as collateral. For the majority of households, housing equity is the principal form of wealth, other than human capital, and it thus represents an important form of potential collateral for borrowing. In that sense, housing equity is an opportunity in the same way that housing leverage is a risk. It turns out that aggregate housing equity at the end of 2015 was very close, in nominal terms, to its pre-crisis (2005) level. But housing wealth has moved to a different group of people—made up of people who are older and have higher credit scores than a decade ago. In today’s post, we look at the evolution of housing equity and its owners.
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