The Credit Bubble - Part 1

The Credit Bubble

The Great Housing Bubble was not really about housing; it was about credit. Most financial bubbles are the result of an expansion of credit, and the Great Housing Bubble was no exception. Housing just happened to be the asset class into which this capital flowed. It could have been stocks or commodities just as easily, and if the government gets too aggressive in its actions to prevent a collapse in housing prices, the liquidity intended to prop up real estate prices will likely flow into some other asset class creating yet another asset price bubble.

The root causes of the Great Housing Bubble can be traced back to four interrelated factors:

1. Separation of origination, servicing, and portfolio holding in the lending industry.
2. Innovation in structured finance and the expansion of the secondary mortgage market.
3. The lowering of lending standards and the growth of subprime lending.
4. Lower FED funds rates as an indirect and minor force. [1]

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, also known as Freddie Mac, was created by Congress in 1970 to make possible a secondary mortgage market to provide greater liquidity to banks and other lending institutions to facilitate home mortgage lending. The Federal National Mortgage Corporation, also known as Fannie Mae, was originally created by the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1938. In the beginning, Fannie Mae would securitize FHA loans, and it was the first to create a secondary mortgage market. In 1968, the company was privatized to remove its debt from the balance sheet of the Federal Government. Fannie Mae’s role in purchasing FHA loans was replaced by the Government National Mortgage Association, also known as Ginnie Mae. Both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are private corporations that have the implied backing of the Federal Government even though their activities are explicitly not guaranteed (until they were taken into conservatorship in September 2008). Collectively Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae and Ginnie Mae are known as Government Sponsored Entities or GSEs, and they are responsible for maintaining a secondary market for mortgage backed securities.

Valuation of Lots and Raw Land

Valuation of Lots and Raw Land

The valuation of land used for residential housing is mysterious and often misunderstood. [1] The valuation of lots and raw land requires a detailed knowledge of construction and marketing costs as well as a good estimate of the sales price of the final product: a residential housing unit. In short, the value of a lot is the total revenue (sales price of the home) minus the costs of production and the necessary profit. Land value is a residual calculation.

Irvine, California, has been almost entirely developed by a single land owner, The Irvine Company, as a large, master-planned community. The development has been wildly successful. The median income of buyers on The Ranch is 30% above the Orange County median. This translates into higher home prices and higher land values. The Irvine Company makes a profit by selling its land to builders who build and sell houses in the community. Once the forces governing land value are understood, it becomes obvious why the Irvine Company is protective of house prices in Irvine, and why The Irvine Company wants to maximize salable density on its land holdings like any other developer would.

Fundamental Valuation of Houses - Part 2

Investment Value

The United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics measures the Rent of primary residence (rent) and Owners' equivalent rent of primary residence (rental equivalence). They make this distinction because a house has both a consumptive purpose and an investment purpose. The consumptive value is measured by rent or rental equivalence. There is legitimate financial reason to pay more than the rental equivalence price. The normal rate of house appreciation–not the unsustainable kind witnessed during the Great Housing Bubble–can provide a return on investment. The source of this added value is the leverage of mortgage financing and the hedge against inflation obtained through a fixed-rate mortgage. The investment premium, which is about 10%, is less than most people think.

The rental equivalence value is the fundamental value of real estate, and it is also its consumptive value. This value can be easily measured as demonstrated in the previous section. There is an independent investment value that can also be measured and added to the consumptive value to arrive at the maximum resale value of the property. Investment value is derived from two sources: the increase in property value through appreciation and the long-term savings over renting caused by inflation. These two components are measured separately to demonstrate how they function and how much each of them is worth.

Since the return on investment generated from residential real estate occurs in the future, a discounted cashflow analysis is required to determine the net present value of the future returns. Calculating net present value sounds complex, and manually going through the calculations is quite cumbersome, but electronic spreadsheets make this an easy task. The concept is simple: how much money would investors put in an investment today if they knew the rate of growth and the cash value to be realized in the future. For instance, if investors put $100 in a bank earning 5% interest, they would have $105 at the end of the year. Net present value looks at the situation in reverse. If investors knew they would receive $105 at the end of the year and the market interest rate was 5%, they would be willing to pay $100 for it today. Similarly, the investment value of residential real estate is the value today of an amount of money to be received in the future either through sale or savings on rent.

Fundamental Valuation of Houses - Part 1

What they are saying about The Great Housing Bubble

"The author, Larry Roberts, is best known for his daily posts as IrvineRenter on the Irvine Housing Blog. Long before Lehman crashed, Fannie Mae was taken over, and even before home prices were dropping nationally, he was one of the few voices presenting real information on the housing bubble.

The author's background is in new housing development in Southern California. It was a good start to understanding how things worked. Supplemented by knowledge from countless posters at the housing blog, he has been able to show why home prices couldn't stay elevated. Price to income ratios, price to rent ratios, and other factors detailed in the book showed how far out of line prices had become by 2006. A full year before house prices started to crash, he was predicting it, and many of the crash's details. While some people are permanently bullish or bearish on housing, the best are able to understand and explain the mechanisms, tell you what will happen in what sequence.

The Great Housing Bubble is an excellent read, and an important one."

Brian Whitworth – Principal, FinancialPatents.com

Fundamental Valuation of Houses

The fundamental value of all housing prices is equivalent rents. Rents define the fundamental value of real estate because rental is a direct proxy for ownership; both rental and ownership provide for possession of property. Equivalent rents are a major component of the United States Government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI). [1]  According to the US Department of Labor, “This approach measures the change in the price of the shelter services provided by owner-occupied housing. Rental equivalence measures the change in the implicit rent, which is the amount a homeowner would pay to rent, or would earn from renting, his or her home in a competitive market. Clearly, the rental value of owned homes is not an easily determined dollar amount, and Housing survey analysts must spend considerable time and effort in estimating this value.” Prior to the first California housing bubble in the late 1970s, the housing cost component of the CPI was measured using actual price changes in the asset. When this bubble created an enormous distortion in this index, the rental equivalence model was constructed. It has been used to smooth out the psychologically-induced housing price bubbles ever since.

An argument can be made for the real cost of construction as the fundamental valuation of houses. If house prices in a market fall below the cost of new construction, no new houses will be built because a builder cannot make a profit. If there is continuing demand for housing, the lack of supply will create an imbalance which will cause prices to increase. When new construction becomes profitable again, new product will be brought to market bringing supply and demand back into balance. If demand continues to be strong, builders will increase production to meet this demand keeping prices near the real cost of construction.

Conservative House Financing - Part 3

What they are saying about The Great Housing Bubble

"…the author has a background in real estate that's far removed from the sales process, he's able to step back and provide the sort of unemotional, macro-economic overview that seems quite atypical for a guide to investing in real estate.

…Filled with 64 exhibits, 146 footnotes and a nine-page bibliography of source material, "The Great Housing Bubble" is probably not a casual read during a day at the pool or the beach. But for real estate professionals wanting to educate themselves or their clients on how to successfully build wealth through the buying and selling of real property, this author has a lot to teach."

Patrick S. Duffy – Principal with MetroIntelligence Real Estate Advisors and author of The Housing Chronicles Blog.

Mortgage Equity Withdrawal

Mortgage Equity Withdrawal or MEW is the process of obtaining cash through refinancing residential real estate using the accumulated equity as collateral for the loan. Before MEW homeowners would have to wait until the property was sold to get their equity converted to cash. Apparently, this was deemed an inefficient use of capital, so lenders found ways to “liberate” this equity with home equity lines of credit or cash-out mortgage refinancing. Home equity lines of credit are popular with lenders despite the additional risk of being in the second or third lien position because borrowers are less likely to default or prepay than non-cash-out refinancing. [1] The impact of MEW on equity is obvious; it reduces equity by increasing the loan balance. It has been noted that equity is a fantasy and debt is real, and MEW is the process of living the fantasy with the addition of very real debt. MEW has been utilized by homeowners for home improvement for decades, but the widespread use of this money for consumer spending was largely an innovation of the Great Housing Bubble. [ii] Since consumer spending is almost 70% of the US economy, mortgage equity withdrawal was the primary mechanism of economic growth after the recession of 2001–a recession caused by the deflation of another asset bubble, the NASDAQ technology stock bubble.

Conservative House Financing - Part 2

What they are saying about The Great Housing Bubble

"The author does an excellent job in showing how various commercial and investment banks sought to create a speculative market for home loans by the process of securitization. The main tool was collateralized debt obligations (CDO'S).The idea is purely speculative since real estate is a nonliquid durable asset. The bundling and selling of trillions of dollars worth of the subprime backed bonds that were not only highly risky, but of uncertain value, created the bubble that deflated just as every other banker financed, speculative bubble has deflated in world history.

The author does a good job in demonstrating that low interest rates were not the cause of the problem. The main cause of the problem was the loan practices of various financial institutions that threw overboard their own clearly specified creditworthiness criteria and standards for borrowers seeking loans."

Michael Emmett Brady – PhD Economics

Stated Income Loans

One unique phenomenon of the Great Housing Bubble was the utilization of stated-income loans, also known as “liar loans” because most people were not truthful when stating their income. Loan documentation is usually a routine part of obtaining financing. Lenders ordinarily require a borrower to provide documentation proving income, assets and debt. However, during the final stages of the Great Housing Bubble, loan documentation was seen as an unnecessary barrier to completing more transactions, and loan programs which circumvented normal documentation procedures flourished. The fact that these programs existed at all is remarkable proof of the risk lenders were taking through the relaxing or outright elimination of lending standards. Eighty-one percent of Alt-A purchase originations in 2006 were stated-income, and 50% of subprime originations in 2005 and 2006 were stated income (Credit Suisse, 2007). Stated income loans increased from 18% of originations in 2001 to 49% in 2006 according to Loan Performance. In a related study by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, 60% of stated-income borrowers had exaggerated their incomes by more than 50%.[1],[ii] Obviously, lying about one’s income to obtain a loan is not a conservative method of financing a property purchase.

The stated-income loan was originally provided to borrowers such as the self-employed who most often do not have W-2s to verify income. When these loan programs were first started, they were not made available to borrowers with W-2s as the transparency of the lie would have been obvious to all parties. During the bubble rally, this loan was made available to anyone, and lying was not only encouraged, borrowers were often assisted in fabricating paperwork by aggressive loan officers and mortgage brokers. [iii] Since the loan could be packaged and sold to investors who had no idea what they were buying, there was a complete lack of concern for whether or not the borrower actually made the money stated in the loan application and thereby could actually make the payments on the loan. Everyone involved was raking in large fees, the borrower was obtaining the real estate they desired, and for a time, the investor was receiving payments from the borrower. [iv] As long as prices were rising, everyone benefited from the arrangement. Of course, once prices started to fall, borrowers did not want to continue making payments they could not afford, and the whole system collapsed in a massive credit crunch.

Conservative House Financing - Part 1

What they are saying about The Great Housing Bubble

"The Great Housing Bubble is a fantastic resource for anyone looking to understand why home prices fell. The writing has exceptional depth and detail, and it is presented in an engaging and easy-to-understand manner. It is destined to be the standard by which other books on the subject will be measured. It is the first book written after prices peaked, and it is the first in the genre to detail the psychological factors that are arguably more important for understanding the housing bubble. There have been a number of books written while prices were rising that used measures of price relative to historic norms and sounded the alarm of an impending market crash. Economic statistics and technical, measurable factors show what people did, but they do not explain why they did it. The Great Housing Bubble analyzes not only what happened; it explains why it happened.

Morgan Brown – The Great Loan Blog

Conservative House Financing

When people decide they want to buy a house, they figure out how much they can afford, then they search for something they want in their price range. For most people, what they can “afford” depends almost entirely upon how much a lender is willing to loan them. Lenders apply debt-to-income ratios and other affordability criteria to determine how much they are willing to loan. Buyers are generally limited in how much they can borrow because lenders are wise enough not to loan borrowers so much that they default. Borrowers behave much like drug addicts–they will borrow all the money a lender will loan them whether it is good for them or not. Most borrowers are not wise to the differences between the various loan types, and they have limited understanding of the risks they are taking on.

The vast majority of residential home sales have lender financing. The interest rates and various loan terms have evolved over time. After World War II a series of government programs to encourage home ownership spawned a surge in construction and the evolution of private lending terms resulting in the 30-year conventionally amortized mortgage. This mortgage generally required a 20% downpayment, and allowed the borrower to consume no more than 28% of their gross income on housing. These conservative terms became the standard for nearly 50 years. Lending under these terms resulted in low default rates and a high degree of market price stability.

There were experiments with various forms of exotic financing during this period, particularly in markets like California where price volatility required special terms to facilitate buying at inflated pricing. The instability of these loan programs was demonstrated painfully during the deep market correction of the early 90s in California characterized by high default rates and lender losses. Rather than learn a difficult lesson regarding the use of these alternative financing terms from this experience, lenders sought out ways of shifting these risks to others though a complex transaction called a credit default swap. Once lenders and investors in mortgages thought the risk was mitigated, these unstable loan programs were brought back and made widely available to the general public resulting in the Great Housing Bubble.