- Housing Markets and Unconventional Monetary Policy, Charles Rahal.
- The Effect of Housing Wealth Shocks on Work and Retirement Decisions, Jaclene Begley & Sewin Chan.
- Millennials, Baby Boomers, and Rebounding Multifamily Home Construction, Jordan Rappaport, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Working Paper.
- House Money and Entrepreneurship, Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr & Ramana Nanda, Harvard Business School Entrepreneurial Management Working Paper No. 15-069.
- The Rescue of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, W. Scott Frame, Andreas Fuster, Joseph S. Tracy, & James I. Vickery, FRB Atlanta Working Paper No. FEDAWP2015-02.
- Second Homes: Households’ Life Dream or (Wrong) Investment?, Marianna Brunetti & Costanza Torricelli, CEIS Working Paper No. 351.
- Holding Deposit Agreements: Pre-Tenancy Obligations and Rights, Samuel Beswick, Landlord & Tenant Review, vol. 19(4), pp. 143-147, 2015.
- Housing Tenure and Unemployment, Richard K. Green & Bingbing Wang.
Tag Archives: housing market
What To Do With MERS?
Bloomberg BNA quoted me in More Policy Queries As MERS Racks Up Court Wins (behind a paywall). The article further discusses the case I had blogged about earlier this week. It reads, in part,
Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS), the keeper of a major piece of the U.S. housing market’s infrastructure, has beaten back the latest court challenge to its national tracking system, even as criticism of the company keeps coming (Montgomery County v. MERSCORP, Inc., 2015 BL 247363, 3d Cir., No. 14-cv-04315, 8/3/15). In an Aug. 3 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed a lower court ruling in favor of Nancy J. Becker, the recorder of deeds for Montgomery County, Pa., whose lawsuit claimed MERS illegally sidestepped millions of dollars in recording fees.
* * *
MERS has faced an array of critics, including those who say its tracking system is cloaked in secrecy. MERS disagrees, and provides a web portal for homeowners seeking information.
A host of friend-of-the-court briefs filed in the Third Circuit blasted the company, including one filed in March by law school professors who said the MERS system “has introduced unprecedented opacity and incompleteness to the record of interests in real estate.”
One of those, Brooklyn Law School Professor David Reiss, Aug. 6 raised the question whether MERS, though not a servicer, might be the subject of increased oversight.
“The problems consumers faced during the foreclosure crisis were compounded by MERS,” Reiss told Bloomberg BNA. “Those issues have not been resolved by the MERS litigation, and it would be interesting to see if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will seek to regulate MERS as an important player in the servicing industry. It would also be interesting to see whether state regulators will pick the ball in this area by further regulating MERS to increase transparency and procedural fairness for homeowners,” he said.
Foreclosures & Credit Card Debt
Paul S. Calem, Julapa Jagtiani and William W. Lang have posted Foreclosure Delay and Consumer Credit Performance to SSRN. Effectively, it argues that long foreclosure delays may have reduced the credit card default rate because homeowners in default were able to pay down their credit card debt while living for free in their homes. The abstract reads,
The deep housing market recession from 2008 through 2010 was characterized by a steep rise in the number of foreclosures and lengthening foreclosure timelines. The average length of time from the onset of delinquency through the end of the foreclosure process also expanded significantly, averaging up to three years in some states. Most individuals undergoing foreclosure were experiencing serious financial stress. However, the extended foreclosure timelines enabled mortgage defaulters to live in their homes without making mortgage payments until the end of the foreclosure process, thus providing temporary income and liquidity benefits from lower housing costs. This paper investigates the impact of extended foreclosure timelines on borrower performance with credit card debt. Our results indicate that a longer period of nonpayment of mortgage expenses results in higher cure rates on delinquent credit cards and reduced credit card balances. Foreclosure process delays may have mitigated the impact of the economic downturn on credit card default.
The authors conclude,
our findings indicate that households do not consume all the benefits from temporary relief from housing expenses; instead, they use that temporary relief to cure delinquent credit card debt and reduce their credit card balances. Interestingly, we find that payment relief from loan modifications has a similar impact to payment relief from longer foreclosure timelines; both are associated with curing card delinquency and reducing card balances.
These households, however, are likely to become delinquent on their credit cards again within six quarters following the end of the foreclosure process. Thus, the results suggest that there may be added risk for nonmortgage lenders when foreclosures are completed and households must incur the transaction costs of moving and incur significant housing expenses once again. This implies an additional dimension of risk to credit card lenders that has not been observed previously. (23)
I am not sure what to make of these findings for borrowers, regulators, credit card lenders or mortgage lenders. Would a utility-maximizing borrower run up their credit card debt while in foreclosure? Should states seek to change foreclosure timelines to change consumer or lender behavior? Should profit-maximizing credit card lenders seek to further limit borrowing upon a mortgage default? What should profit-maximizing mortgage lenders do? I have lots of questions but no good answers yet.
Airbnb in NYC
New York Communities for Change/Real Affordability for All have issued a housing report, Airbnb in NYC. This is an advocacy piece that raises important questions about how Airbnb is changing the nature of housing markets in a hot destinations. The report states that
A new independent analysis of Airbnb’s website by www.InsideAirbnb.com shows that nearly 16,000 or just under 60% of Airbnb listings are entire homes or apartments for rent (in violation of state law and/or NYC zoning laws), and that they are available for rent an average of 247 days a year. To put that in perspective, those 16,000 Airbnb listings that are not available for everyday New Yorkers would be the equivalent of a loss of approximately one full year of Mayor de Blasio’s ten-year plan to build and preserve 200,000 affordable housing units, negating nearly all of the affordable apartments the administration has financed in the past year.
Despite Airbnb’s claims that the nearly 90 percent of their listings are from regular New Yorkers renting out spare rooms to make extra cash, the InsideAirbnb.com data show that nearly one-third of Airbnb listings come from hosts with multiple units, such as commercial landlords. (3)
While Airbnb has criticized the methodology of this report, it does appear to undercut Airbnb’s characterization of its hosts.
Opponents of the sharing economy will find a lot in this report that confirms their concerns. For instance, in the top 20 Airbnb zip codes in NYC, “housing units are rented on Airbnb for rates equivalent to more than 300% of the neighborhood’s average rent.” (5)
But supporters of the sharing economy will also find much to confirm their own views: “In 20 different zip codes in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, entire/home/apartment Airbnb listings comprise at least 10% of total rentals.” (5) Supporters will say that the people have spoken with their pocketbooks — the sharing economy is here to stay, notwithstanding what the law says.
The sharing economy continues to shake up the old economy. The fact that so many Airbnb listings in NYC appear to violate the law means that the controversy over its appropriate role will probably come to a head sooner rather than later. The outcome of that controversy will then spill over and permeate the hottest residential neighborhoods in the hottest cities in the U.S.
Wednesday’s Academic Roundup
- The Marginal Effect of First-Time Homebuyer Status on Mortgage Default and Prepayment, Saty Patrabansh, FHFA Working Paper 15-2.
- Gender Bias and Credit Access, Steven Ongena & Alexander A. Popov, ECB Working Paper No. 1822.
- Explaining the Boom-Bust Cycle in the U.S. Housing Market: A Reverse-Engineering Approach, Paolo Gelain, Kevin J. Lansing & Gisle James Natvik, Norges Bank Working Paper 11, 2014.
- Monetary Policy, Hot Housing Markets and Leverage, Christoph Ungerer, FEDS Working Paper No. 2015-048.
- Fraudulent Income Overstatement on Mortgage Applications During the Credit Expansion of 2002 to 2005, Atif R. Mian & Amir Sufi, Chicago Booth Research Paper No. 15-16.
The Importance of Understanding G-Fees
The Federal Housing Finance Agency has released Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Single-Family Guarantee Fees in 2014. Ok, ok, this is some really technical stuff. But it gives us a lot of important information about what goes into the cost of a home mortgage.
The executive summary opens, “The Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA) requires the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to submit reports to Congress annually on the guarantee fees charged by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises).” (2, footnotes omitted) The report finds that “the average level of guarantee fees charged has increased since 2009. The guarantee fees are currently two-and-a-half times their previous level; from 2009 to 2014, average fees increased from 22 basis points to 58 basis points. From 2013 to 2014, average fees increased from 51 basis points to 58 basis points.” (2, footnote omitted)
For all of you non-experts out there, a basis point is 1/100th of a percentage point. So a guarantee fee (or g-fee in the lingo) of 58 basis points increases the interest rate paid by more than half a percentage point (for instance, from 4.5% to 5.08%). So homeowners should want to understand why g-fees have more than doubled since 2009.
The report breaks down how g-fees gradually increased in response to Congressional and FHFA requirements, some of which are not tied to housing finance goals at all. For instance, Congress added ten basis points to fund an extension of a tax cut.
Many have argued that g-fees should be kept as low as possible in order to help out the housing market. I do not take that position, in large part because cheap credit does not necessarily lower the cost of housing; sellers may just be able to raise the price of their homes in a cheap credit environment. I also believe that the housing market and the mortgage market need to achieve some sort of equilibrium and unnaturally low g-fees will distort such an equilibrium.
The price of the g-fee should reflect the real costs of the g-fee. For instance, it should cover the cost of losses that result from borrower default. It should not be used to fund programs unrelated to housing. G-fees that are unnaturally high distort the housing finance market and make homeowners subsidize other constituencies. Federal housing finance policy tends to get screwed up if it veers too much from its fundamentals, so we should not ask too much of the g-fee.
Fannie and Freddie have been in limbo ever since they entered conservatorship in 2008. The longer they are in that limbo, the more likely it is that Congress will use them to do all sorts of things that do not relate to maintaining a liquid housing finance market. This study outlines how the g-fee has morphed over time and is a wake-up call to homeowners and policy makers alike to set Fannie and Freddie on a healthy course for the long term, starting with that obscure and technical g-fee.
Friday’s Government Reports
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) announces access to the consumer complaint database where users can read consumer narratives and download complaint data as desired. The CFPB describes it as an enhanced public-facing consumer complaint database, which includes for the first time over 7,700 consumer accounts of problems they are facing with financial services providers – including mortgages, bank accounts, credit cards, debt collection, etc.
- U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Semi-Annual Report to Congress (SAR) for the period ending March 31, 2015 – In which it details how: $1.2 billion in funds put to better use; more than $1.7 billion in questioned costs; and more than $457 million in collections through 38 audit reports were reported. HUD also reported more than $38 million in recoveries.
- HUD’s Policy Development and Research Division (PD&R) publishes reports every quarter profiling 12-15 housing markets, the latest batch includes, amoung others: Denver-Aurora-Lakewood, Colorado; Savannah, Georgia; and Spokane, Washington.
