Introduction
For the past few years, we have produced our proprietary Home Price Appreciation (“HPA”)
outlook for the 100 largest MSAs.1 The key premise for our work has been that affordability,
which had dropped during the housing bubble, would mean-revert, largely via a correction in
home prices. Until very recently, this methodology has served us well in being early to
identify the bubble and pegging its magnitude. However, in many areas, the bubble has now
burst and affordability, or perhaps any “fundamental” or “fair value” measure, is no longer
the driving factor. By our estimates, home prices have now declined in a majority of MSAs to
such an extent that not only has affordability been restored to “pre-bubble” levels (e.g., in our
analysis, 2000-20032)—affordability is now as high as it has ever been since the beginning of
our home price data series (1980; or nearly 30 years and four recessions ago). As home
prices continue to fall, it is clear that factors other than affordability are driving HPA in many
MSAs. In this article, we introduce new variables to augment our affordability framework.
With these new variables, our outlook is now for a further 16.5% nationwide decline in home
prices over the next two years. This equates to a peak-to-trough decline of 39.6%—versus
our peak-to-trough assumption of 32% back in the September 2008 Outlook.
Will U.S. housing have a lost decade? As Figure 1 shows, a very simple way of viewing our
HPA outlook is to note that, by 2011, nominal home prices will be restored, on average, to
Q2 2001 levels, i.e. a decade earlier. The 2000-2003 period also happens to be what we have
designated as “pre bubble.” At a minimum, it was well before the rapid growth in non-prime
purchase mortgage activity, which had surely been a large culprit in the bubble, and is now
virtually extinct.
Table of contents
Introduction ................................................................. 3
The methodology ........................................................ 4
Affordability – still a useful starting point,
but no longer the lead story ........................................ 6
Unemployment rate..................................................... 9
Change in unemployment rate .................................. 11
Actual home price declines ....................................... 12
Excess distressed inventory...................................... 13
Conclusion................................................................. 18
Appendix
Appendix A: MSAs ranked by their percentage
of Alt-A and subprime................................................ 19
Appendix B: Definitions of three widely used
home price indices .................................................... 22
Appendix C: Our affordability methodology.............. 23
Appendix D: Unemployment rate.............................. 25
Appendix E: Change in unemployment rate.............. 28
Appendix F: Actual home price declines................... 31
Appendix G: Excess distressed inventory ................. 34