housing

Centre for London report finds levy on property wealth would free up homes, fund social housing and help renters save for deposits Stamp duty should be scrapped and replaced with a new property wealth tax to fix London’s housing crisis, a leading thinktank has proposed. A report on the capital’s property market suggests an annual tax to replace the levy paid when buying a property and council tax…

“Homeownership has long been one of the most reliable paths by which ordinary people build wealth,” writes Project 21 Ambassador Craig DeLuz in the commentary below.  However, “the large-scale acquisition of single-family homes by institutional investors” is preventing a growing number of Americans from reaching that...

Here is one narrative violation in the usual drumbeat of doom that we’re used to hearing about housing in America: The rent, in many cities across the US, is getting cheaper.  After soaring to Covid-era highs, rents have cooled. Last month, the national median rent was down 1.7 percent from one year prior, according to […]

Based on recent proposals and policy dialogue, it would appear that first-time home buyers (FTB) are indeed facing desperate times. For example, in a recent Urban Institute study , Michael Stegman, Ted Tozer, and Richard Green advocate for a zero-downpayment Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage. They argue that this would be a more efficient way to deliver much needed support to help hou…

In May 2022, Sam Khater —chief economist for Freddie Mac—argued that a surge in first-time buyers had been an important driver of the housing market the previous year. In contrast, using data from the New York Fed Consumer Credit Panel, we find that the share of home purchases by first-time buyers fell in 2021. This suggests that other factors were important to the rapid increase in house prices …

Tight inventories of homes for sale combined with strong demand pushed up national house prices by an eye-popping 19 percent, year over year, in January 2022. This surge in house prices created concerns that first-time buyers would increasingly be priced out of owning a home . However, using our Consumer Credit Panel, which is based on anonymized Equifax credit report data, we find that the share…

During the pandemic, national home values and housing activity soared as mortgage rates declined to historic lows. Under the canonical “user cost” house price model, home values are held to be very sensitive to interest rates, especially at low interest rate levels. A calibration of this model can account for the house price boom with the observed decline in interest rates. But empirically, we fi…

In this post we take up the important question of the sustainability of homeownership for first-time buyers. The evaluation of public policies aimed at promoting the transition of individuals from renting to owning should depend not only on the degree to which such policies increase the number of first-time buyers, but also importantly on whether these new buyers are able to sustain their homeown…

Much of the concern about affordable homeownership has focused on first-time buyers. These buyers, who are often making the transition from renting to owning, can find it difficult to save to meet down-payment requirements; this is particularly true in those areas where rent takes up a significant portion of a household’s monthly income. In contrast to first-time buyers, repeat buyers can typica…

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.

Recent activity in the U.S. housing market has been widely perceived as disappointing.