At the end of 2021, things looked rosy for the global housing sector. Across the 38 countries in the OECD, house prices were growing at the fastest pace since records began 50 years earlier.
Analysis of data from Oxford Economics, a consultancy, shows a similar trend. In 41 countries, from Norway to New Zealand, house prices were rising, bolstered by record low borrowing costs and buyers with savings to spend. Arguably, there had never been a better time to own a home.
Not even a year later, and the picture is completely different. While homeowners around the world are reckoning with increasingly unaffordable mortgage payments, prospective homebuyers are facing house prices that are rising faster than incomes. In the background, a global cost of living crisis deepens.
What has changed, of course, is the spectre of rising prices and the economic shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This fuelled a surge in inflation — now at multi-decade highs in many countries — which prompted central banks around the world to sharply tighten monetary policy. The OECD also predicts that real-term wages are likely to fall next year.
The upshot is that a pandemic-induced housing boom in the world’s richest countries is likely to be followed by the broadest housing market slowdown since the financial crash. This, in turn, could add further pressure on to flagging economies.
Now, nearly all of the countries in the Oxford Economics database are expected to experience a slowdown next year, marking the most widespread deceleration in housing price growth since at least 2000. More than half are likely to register an outright price contraction — something last seen in 2009.
“This is the most worrying housing market outlook since 2007-2008, with markets poised between the prospect of modest declines and much steeper ones,” says Adam Slater, lead economist at Oxford Economics. “The ongoing surge in mortgage rates in advanced economies threatens to push some housing markets into steep downturns.”
The IMF agrees. It warns the global housing market is at a “tipping point”.
“As central banks around the globe aggressively tighten monetary policy to tackle price pressures, soaring borrowing costs and tighter lending standards, coupled with stretched house valuations, could lead to a sharp decline in house prices,” its global financial stability report says.
This “sharp decline” will be widespread. While the FT analysis based on Oxford Economics data largely covers advanced economies, the IMF forecasts that in a severely adverse scenario, real house prices could decline by 25 per cent over the next three years in emerging markets compared to 10 per cent in advanced economies.
A housing market slowdown is also likely to depress broader economic activity, hurting the construction sector and its suppliers.
Slater predicts that the housing downturn could shave off 0.2 percentage points from global growth as a result of reduced spending and another 0.6 percentage points owing to lower residential investment.
The Bank of Canada estimates that the housing downturn will reduce economic growth by 0.6 percentage points to 0.9 per cent next year.
This dynamic is already playing out in China where a property crisis has intensified in recent months and its economy this year has grown at its slowest pace since records began in 1992, excluding the pandemic period. Housing floor space sold is down 26 per cent in the year to September compared with the same period last year.
Because the sale of properties not yet built is a major source of funding for developers, the sharp decrease as the country presses on with its zero-Covid policy has created self-reinforcing liquidity pressures and harmed the economy.
Too expensive to borrow
The biggest factor in the slowdown is undeniably mortgage rates.
In the US, the rate for a 30-year deal has stabilised at about 7 per cent, more than double the rate last year and the highest since 2008, following a quick succession of rate increases by the Federal Reserve.
Combined with the boom in house prices in the previous two years, the monthly mortgage payment on a typical property rose to more than $2,600, up from $1,700 a year earlier.
“These are rates that I think are likely to be much more of a headwind and indeed we’re seeing the housing market slow,” says Nathan Sheets, chief economist at US bank Citi.
This pattern is similar in many countries. Mortgage rates have risen to their highest level in recent years across the eurozone, as well as in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
“With mortgage rates rising and banks holding back lending, depressing demand, we remain confident in our view that eurozone house price growth is set to fall sharply and will turn negative by the end of 2023,” says Melanie Debono, economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.
Marcel Thieliant, economist at Capital Economics, estimates that mortgage payments in New Zealand have already soared to above 60 per cent of the median income, up from below 45 per cent before the outbreak of Covid-19.
With interest rates set to rise further, he forecasts a 25 per cent fall in New Zealand’s house prices from their peak in November.
In the UK, the mortgage market has been sent into turmoil by the political crisis triggered by the large tax cuts proposed by Liz Truss’s shortlived government. Markets have calmed down with the appointment of Rishi Sunak, the new prime minister, but interest rates are still expected to rise to about 4.6 per cent next year from the current 3 per cent.
The Resolution Foundation, a UK think-tank, calculated that for nearly a fifth of households, mortgage payments could shoot up by more than £5,000 a year by the end of 2023.
As a result, economists forecast a 2023 UK housing price crash varying from 4.4 per cent for Oxford Economics to 10 per cent and 12 per cent for the real estate agent Savills and the consultancy Capital Economics, respectively.
The rise in mortgage rates reflects the increase in policy rates that have risen sharply as many central banks battle the fastest pace of inflation for decades. The US, the UK and the eurozone combined have increased rates by nearly 900 basis points over the past year, with markets expecting another 400 basis points increase by summer next year. Most emerging markets have seen even steeper rate rises. Brazil has aggressively pushed up rates to 13.75 per cent from only 2 per cent in January 2021 and, in Hungary, there was a 12.4 percentage points increase to 13 per cent.
“Our rough rule of thumb has been that every 100 basis point increase in policy rates leads to a decline in house price growth of one-and-a-half to two percentage points,” says Prakash Loungani, adviser in the research department of the IMF.
The European Central Bank calculates that in a low interest rate environment, a 1 percentage point mortgage rate increase corresponds to roughly a 9 per cent decline in house prices and a 15 per cent decline in housing investment after about two years.
As the financial pressures on households increase, the savings accumulated during the pandemic that helped support the housing boom are rapidly depleting. Not only can households buy less with their money, they are more likely to struggle to save for a deposit.
In the US, “the rising cost of living and falling equity markets have made it more challenging to save enough of a downpayment for first-time buyers — the lifeblood of the market,” says James Knightley, economist at ING.
What strength there is in the housing market in part reflects buyers rushing to lock in mortgage deals before rates increase further. Rent prices also remain strong, because of steady demand from those unable to afford to buy a property.
In many countries, house prices are being maintained by low housing stocks. In October, the UK stock of property for sale for each surveyor was the lowest since records began in 1978, while inventories remain low by historical standards in the US.
But the signs of the market downturn are clearly visible. Housing inflation is already slowing in most markets, including Germany, Australia and China.
Australia registered its first annual contraction and in the US the annual house price growth slowed to 13 per cent in August from 16 per cent in the previous month, the fastest deceleration since the index began in 1975. Capital Economics expects US house prices to fall 8 per cent from peak to trough next year.
Real estate consultancy Knight Frank reported that, at the end of the third quarter, house prices in major cities were in their second consecutive quarter of growth slowdown. Cities in New Zealand, Canada and Norway are registering double-digit contractions.
Because low stock is still supporting prices, the upcoming downturn is more visible in transactions.
In the eurozone, banks are increasingly rejecting housing…
Read More:The global housing market is heading for a brutal downturn
2022-11-12 11:00:55
