ERES:conference

"Polish housing market has been developing significantly since 2005. However, recent real estate market crisis and financial collapse in USA and European countries did not remain without an impact on Polish economy. The immediate reaction of Polish banking sector was a tightening of mortgage lending. Financial Supervision Authority recommended to reduce the available LTV to 70% and only for borrowers with high creditability. Reduced availability of mortgage loan resulted in declining demand for residential properties. The latest statistics show that the prices of properties in main Polish cities has decreased by 5-7%. The aim of the paper is to investigate possible consequences of recent financial crisis for Polish real estate market development. Is it a temporary slowdown or a long term collapse?""

Housing affordability is a policy that is often accorded a great deal of policy attention by governments of many countries. In this paper, we examine the market implications of setting a house price to household income policy target for a market segment by the government. The policy requires active intervention on the housing supply side by the government with regard to the targeted sector. In the presence of uncertainty and resource constraints, the objective of house price affordability is achieved for the targeted household at the expense of greater volatility in residential construction activity. When the size of the targeted sector is significant in size, there are spillover price and volume effects on the non-targeted housing market segment. This results in political pressure on the government to expand housing affordability targets to increasing segments of the population. Using a simple model of the housing market with a housing affordability policy target, we derive price elasticity of housing supply of zero and absolute value of price elasticity of demand for housing to be equal to the income elasticity of demand for housing. The Singapore government intervenes extensively in the housing sector to ensure housing affordability, with a resulting homeownership rate of 91 percent for the resident population. The above hypotheses regarding the implication of setting a house price to income ratio target are tested using data for the Singapore housing market.

"During the last ten years there has been dramatic changes in the ownership of commercial real estate in Sweden. This development has lead to a number of different discussions. One question is why Sweden has been so interesting and typical answer is that the market is comparatively transparent and that the liquidity is good. The focus in this article is however if these changes can be explained from an efficiency perspective. If we look at the world from a neo-institutionalist transaction cost perspective we should expect that more rational structures replaces a less rational structure. The buyers are obviously willing to pay more than the sellers demand: the properties are worth more to the buyers than they were for the sellers and on the most general level this should imply that the buyers in some way can get """"more"""" out of the properties. The question is then if it possible to find such rational factors behind the ownership or whether they seem to be driven by other factors. The current financial crises can be expected to lead to new patterns of ownership changes and can therefore be especially interesting to try to sum-up the development in the decade before this crisis."

"The paper considers how UK lending institutions price covenant strength risk. At the outset of the research in March 2008, few could have forecast the level of turbulence that was to hit the financial markets in the autumn of 2008 and that by the end of the year the UK would officially be in recession. However, many had predicted that the UK commercial property market was overheating. The double digit returns of 2003 to 2006 told a story of capital value appreciation on the back of ìyield chasingî investors aided by cheap and available debt finance. Rental growth did not substantiate the yield compression that occurred over this period. The key question from a lending perspective is whether covenant strength risk was appropriately priced during this period. The paper reports on a series of face to face interviews with eight commercial and retail banks carried out during the summer of 2008. The lenders admitted that at the height of the market covenant strength risk was a relevant criterion in lending decisions, but that it was not the dominant factor. In pricing balance sheet loans, cash flow, lease length and re-letting prospects were more important considerations. Crucially, the emphasis appeared to be on short term trading volumes without fully appreciating the risk posed to the loan book during a down turn in the market. Stress testing loans is laudable provided the inputs reflect the reality of the market, during, and at the end of the loan period. In the securitised market the performance of the rating agencies, key in the pricing of fixed income securities, came in for criticism, and as positions unravel this is worthy of further research. The repricing of debt did occur from mid 2007, but the availability of cheap debt finance was undoubtedly a major reason for the overheating of the commercial market.""

There is an extensive literature base on time on the market and the relationship to both asking price and agreed price but relatively little quantitative analysis has been conducted on the process that occurs between the time of listing and agreeing a residential property for sale. This paper concentrates on that period by analysing the bidding process that occurs between listing and agreement. This research focuses on one of the largest datasets of bidding histories for residential properties containing the individual transaction histories of 3000 residential properties in a UK city for the period 2002-2008. It is a period of dramatic change in the housing market combining unprecedented growth of house prices in 2005, 2006 and the early part of 2007 with the market turning in mid/late 2007 followed by a rapid decline in 2008. The paper explores whether there are statistically significant patterns emerging between the bidding behaviour displayed by a winning bidder in comparison to other bidders and how this changes over the cycle. The paper specifically focuses upon incremental time and incremental price differences between the winning bidder and other bidders.