How Does Monetary Policy Affect Housing Development

The housing crisis of 2008 can trace its origins back to the stock market trends of the mid- to late 90 's. During a period of extended growth in the stock market, increased individual wealth among investors led to generalized increases in spending, including in the housing market. With more disposable income in the pockets of consumers, the demand for housing increased in the late 90 's. Due to the fact that homes are large projects and their construction takes a large amount of time, the supply of homes in the market is inelastic on the short term. Because of the fixed supply of homes, as per the law of supply, which

The increasing homeownership rate in the United States is a worthwhile policy goal. The housing economy creates jobs for American citizens as well as brings down the competitive qualities to purchasing a home allowing more middleclass citizens to spend money on houses. In doing so this drives the overall economy up in the United States.

One of the factors that led to the mortgage crisis was the housing bubble. It started in 2001 and climaxed in 2005. A housing bubble is characterized by rapid increase in the value of real estate properties to an extent that

There was decline during the recession of the early 1990s, with the price of homes. The average price of homes in the United States remained somewhat stable until June 1997, then began to decline. The Case-Shiller Home Price index almost tripled from 79.91 in June 1997 to 226.38 in March 2006. The National Association of Realtors home affordability index, which relates the medium price of single family homes to the medium family income, fell below the line in the beginning of the first quarter of 2004, and reversed its in the second quarter of 2006.

In the U.S., a housing bubble began to emerge just after the turn of the 21st century. In these years, the economy was in great shape, interest rates were low, and consumers were ready to buy, which drove up real

The housing industry has been around for many years. It is an important industry and one that will always have a necessity to exist since it creates a product that is one of the essentials of human life, housing. Economics play an important role in the housing industry along with all other industries.

During the first half of the past decade, the U.S. economy experienced a housing bubble in

Macroeconomics is an excellent tool for the analysis of the housing industry as something like a capital good, as a home is considered to be, cannot easily be studied in a short-term platform. Real estate is a good that costs several times more than an average persons annual income, in the United States that number is typically 7 times as much, and in the United Kingdom that number is 14 times as much. Several factors of both supply and demand directly impact the housing market on a macroeconomic scale. (Business Economics, 1)

The crisis that stressed lots of economies and financial systems originated in US mortgage lending markets. First signals of possible problems came in early 2007, when the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation announced about its inability of purchasing high-risk mortgages, after what New Century Financial Corporation - a leading mortgage lender to riskier customers - filed for bankruptcy (John Marshall, 2009). In the research paper of 2009 he claims that source of the crisis emanated from the rise of house pricing, called housing bubble. “US house prices rose dramatically from 1998 until late 2005, more than doubling over this period, and far faster than average wages. Further support for the existence of a bubble came from the ratio of house prices to renting costs which rocketed upwards around 1999..” (John Marshall, 2009, p 10). Housing bubble was also fully analyzed by Dean Baker in his research “The housing Bubble and the financial crisis” in 2008. Dean noticed that, by the middle of 2007, house prices had peaked and began to head downward.

Demand for housing, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, greatly outnumbers the supply available. Simple supply/demand economics tells us that this undersupply of property in the face of overwhelming demand will cause inflation. From March 2014 to March 2015, Sydney saw an average property price increase of 13.1% (ABS: Residential Property Price Indexes 2015). Currently, the RBA’s reaction to this is to play it safe by keeping cash rates at 2% (RBA: Monetary Policy Decision July 2015). The RBA want growth to be sustainable and long term on the Australian economy during a difficult time, but how does this affect the housing market? This lowers the risk of defaulted loans for buyers, particularly on fixed interest rate mortgages. ASIC chariman Greg Hedcraft says that Australia is experiencing a similar housing bubble to the U.S. pre GFC. This was caused by high interest rates and borrowers defaulting loans due to unexpected heightened interest rates, crushing the U.S. (and international) economy. However the RBAs recent interest rate decisions have been heavily criticised, with economists believing that these low interest rates, high consumer incentive to ‘buy now’, and predicted growing unemployment rates – peaking at 6.5% (Federal Budget 2015) could lead to future mortgage defaults and a large debt problem. Australia’s current economic state involving one

Housing demand includes household growth, real incomes, real wealth, tax concessions to both owner-occupied and rental housing, concessions to first homebuyers, returns on alternative investments, cost and availability of finance for housing and the institutional structure affecting housing finance provision (Yates, 2008). The growth in the number of households and in real income results in the increased pressure on housing demand.

When researching past economic recoveries, the housing market is the one to drive the economy out of recession. That being said, this economic recession hasn’t had much of an impact until recently. America’s housing boom had a tremendous influence on the economy for its low prices and flow of new home construction.

Interest rates have a major economic impact on the real estate market. Interest rates directly affect property sales. Residential property realizes the greatest affect as interest rates have a considerable influence on a homebuyer’s capability to purchase a new property. The customer is affected when there are significant increases or decreases in interest rates. Declining interest rates lower the costs of obtaining a mortgage; this in turn creates higher demand for homes, and pushes home prices up. Conversely, high interest rates increase the costs to obtain a mortgage; these increases lower the demand for homes, which creates a decline in home prices. (Stammers, 2016)

According to Wikipedia a housing bubble is a type of economic bubble that occurs periodically in local or global real estate markets. It is characterized by rapid increases in valuations of real property such as housing until they reach unsustainable levels and then decline. Four years into the housing bubble downturn, much of the country remains hopelessly confused about what happened, why it happened and who is to blame. In my research paper I will try and demonstrate what a housing bubble is, some of the reasons for the bubble, was it preventable, how it kept growing, how it burst and how it has affected our economy.

Besides, low interest rates and large inflows of foreign funds created easy credit conditions for years before the crisis and that simulated the boom in housing construction (Steverman and Bogoslaw, 2008). Moreover, easy credit and money inflow greatly contributed to U.S housing bubble and the rise of house’s price.