Are You Living in a Bubble?
Bold Housing Market
Is Expected to Cool Down;
How Far, Fast Is Debatable
December 17, 2004
The Issue
In Las Vegas, home prices leaped 54% in a year's time. In Los Angeles, a median-priced home costs more than twice as much as the average family can afford. And in San Francisco, a home at the midpoint of the price range will set you back $650,000.
Have housing prices hit "bubble" territory? You can make a strong case that they have, at least in California, Florida, Las Vegas and the mid-Atlantic region. Of course, there's no official definition of a bubble -- it's really just a term meant to convey a sense of peril. Bubbles eventually pop, leaving a messy aftermath. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index lost nearly half its value and the Nasdaq Composite Index plunged by nearly 80%. The economy fell into a recession the following year.
Nationally, the case for a housing bubble is much less clear. The median price for a home up for resale rose 41% for the five years ending Oct. 31, according to the National Association of Realtors. That's an annualized gain of 7.1% -- strong, but not terribly bubbly.
But given housing's outsized impact on the economy -- the NAR estimates housing-related spending and investment accounted for a quarter of U.S. gross domestic product in 2003 -- the bubble question is worth exploring. That's especially true now that the unusually low interest rates that fueled the housing boom are slowly coming to an end. Tuesday, the Federal Reserve raised the short-term federal-funds rate by 0.25 percentage point to 2.25%, up from 1% in June. Higher long-term rates are on the horizon. The average 30-year, fixed mortgage rate, now at 5.27%, is expected to hit 6.5% early next year and 7.5% by the end of 2006, according to Economy.com, a research firm.
Next year, home-price appreciation, housing starts and other indicators are widely expected to cool down from their torrid pace. But will it be a slow return to historical trends or something more drastic?
On the One Hand
The bearish case for housing begins with frothy prices, and adds on an extra measure of concern for the ease with which homeowners are borrowing against their newfound wealth and spending their paper gains.
First, ballooning prices: The average price for a U.S. home rose 13% in the year ending Sept. 30, the biggest jump in 25 years, says the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise and Oversight, the agency that oversees mortgage-finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In the third quarter, homes appreciated at an annualized rate of 18.5%, according to the agency's quarterly survey, an indication prices are still rising despite anecdotal evidence they may have peaked in some of the hottest markets.
Second, consumers will pull an estimated $118 billion out of their home equity this year through a borrowing device known as a cash-out refinancing, according to Freddie Mac. In cash-out transactions, homeowners take out a larger mortgage on the appreciated value of their homes and pocket the difference between their old loan and the new one (minus fees). Thanks to falling rates and closing costs, they can even reduce monthly mortgage payments in the process.
So despite the rise in home values, consumers overall are finding themselves more in debt than before. Mortgage debt reached 45% of the market value of homes at the end of 2003 -- a postwar record, according to economist Paul Kasriel at Northern Trust.
Consumers' willingness to borrow against their home equity and spend it on home improvements, household goods, new cars and other items has helped keep the economy afloat for the last three years while businesses have been extremely reluctant to spend. But there are some signs of bubble behavior here. Just last week, the NASD, the brokerage industry's regulator, warned brokers that too many homeowners are playing the stock market with their home-equity money. Meanwhile, mortgage lenders have kept the housing boom going by offering risky low-down-payment and interest-only mortgages with floating rates to borrowers who otherwise couldn't afford to buy.
Rising rates inevitably will cool down housing demand. The NAR forecasts that new home construction will decline 4% next year and sales of existing homes will drop 3%. In November, new home construction fell by 13.1%, steeper than expected. Cash-out refinancings will become less attractive as rates rise, depriving the economy of a significant source of support. And homeowners with floating-rate mortgages will face higher monthly payments and have less to spend on other things.
As a result, the housing sector, which once propped up the economy, might become something of a drag. Participants in the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's recent Economic Outlook Symposium forecast GDP growth to fall next year to a 3.3% pace from an expected 4.4% this year. One of the key factors behind the decline is the expectation that residential housing investment will be flat next year, following an expected 9.7% increase this year. "Most sectors of the economy will be showing more moderate growth rates, but the residential investment portion is driving the overall weakness," says William Strauss, a senior economist with the Chicago Fed.
Most economists are forecasting only modest declines in housing investment next year. But Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, which issues quarterly national outlooks, says residential housing investment still has a long way to fall to reach historic levels.
"I worry that it could be all at once," Mr. Leamer says. Inflation-adjusted residential housing investment hit an all-time high of $3,800 per worker this year, he says, citing government data. To come back to normal levels, housing spending would have to fall by $1,000 per worker, or $150 billion. "It is hard to imagine that housing could return to normal without some severe sluggishness in the economy, possibly another recession," he concludes.
On the Other Hand
The bull's case for housing acknowledges the boom is cooling, but discounts the bears' gloom-and-doom scenarios. And comparisons to the Internet stock-market bubble are dismissed out of hand. "We don't think there's a bubble nationally," says Rod Smyth, chief investment strategist at Wachovia Securities.
True, housing prices are about 14% above their long-term trend, he says. But stocks were 30% to 40% above trend at the peak of the bubble. The level of housing prices is "nothing like the extremes that stock prices were at," he says. Also, housing prices aren't as volatile as stock prices. You're less likely to sell your home because it has fallen in value (assuming you can make the mortgage payments) than you are to unload a losing stock position, he says.
So while some overheated local markets could see painful price adjustments, housing prices nationally will continue to rise, though at a more modest rate. (They haven't fallen on the national level since the Great Depression.) A 5% increase in the median existing home price, which is what the NAR forecasts for next year, "is still a healthy housing expansion," says David Lereah, the NAR's chief economist.
He also points out that the Ofheo price-appreciation numbers are only for homes with mortgages that have been purchased or securitized by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Those figures exclude the high and low ends of the market, where price appreciation has been more moderate, he says. (The NAR expects an 8% increase in the median home-resale price this year and a 9% rise in the median new-home price.)
In fact, NAR data through the third quarter show moderating price-appreciation trends that are anything but bubble-like. About two thirds of metropolitan areas showed slower price growth in the third quarter than in the second. Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Economy.com calls it the beginning of a "well-behaved" move back toward historical price levels.
She foresees only modest price declines in overheated housing markets, nothing like the collapses that occurred in New England in the 1980s and California in the early '90s. In those periods, she says, the economy was in a recession. Today, "employment growth and overall economic growth is expected to be fairly sturdy over the next year, and that will help support the housing market," she says.
Though interest rates are rising, they are still low by historical standards, and low enough to keep the housing market growing, says the NAR's Mr. Lereah. In addition, demographic trends -- the tendency of people to live longer -- work in favor of real estate. The housing boom, he says, "will continue for the remainder of this decade."
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