Real Estate

FHA and Home Occupancy as an Entitlement

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The FHA used to only represent a small portion of the US mortgage market.  FHA buyers were perceived to have poor credit and use this government program (essentially a subsidy) to enable them to purchase a house that they would live in, thus increasing the “social mission” of increased home ownership in the USA.  However, after the meltdown in securitized mortgage lending in 2008, the market for non FHA loans essentially evaporated and the FHA has moved from a small percentage of the mortgage market (maybe 5%) up to as high as 90% in some regions among eligible residences.  There are limits on FHA buyers, mainly that the house / condominium can’t cost more than $369,000 (or $729,750 in some high cost markets like CA and NYC) and that the owner needs to live in the house (not for 2nd homes).

In Chicago many of the condos are below the threshold where FHA financing makes sense and so the issue of whether or not a particular unit is eligible for FHA financing is becoming more important in the marketplace.  Buildings advertise in large letters if their condominium is eligible for FHA financing (on units that qualify under the cost threshold above, of course).  At some point it is possible that buildings that cannot get FHA approval (they have other criteria regarding reserves, commercial tenants, etc…) would be at a severe loss when trying to sell out for the first time to owners or for existing owners to resell to new buyers.

There has not been a lot of discussion on whether or not it makes sense for the Federal government to essentially nationalize the mortgage industry, but that is what is occurring today.  FHA loans are now the only loans in town since their low down payments and rock bottom interest rates drive out competitors at their price levels.  And it is only a matter of time before the FHA raises their cost limits which would further their dominance in the market, leaving only the high end for other types of mortgages.

I also believe that wise developers will tend to “cluster” their pricing right around the FHA limits.  If you have a $450k condo, that is a bad price point if only $384k can be financed, so shrink them down a bit or reduce amenities to hit that price point. As soon as the FHA raises their limits, then the mid-tier condo market will move closer to that pricing point, over time, as developers realize the power of FHA and the limited market for non FHA loans.  This will take a while and be subtle because development is dead now so little is coming onto the market, but I’ll bet you’ll see this in the next wave.

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How Politicians and Regulators Caused the Sub-Prime Financial Crisis of 2007 and the Subsequent Crash of the Global Financial System in 2008, and Likely Will Again

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This is a summary of a working paper available at the links for which comments are welcome. (A later post on related topics appears here.)

Download the paper (1 MB pdf).

That the US financial system crashed and almost collapsed in 2008, causing a globally systemic financial crisis and precipitating a global recession is accepted fact. That US sub-prime lending funded the excess housing demand leading to a bubble in housing prices is also generally accepted. That extremely imprudent risks funded with unprecedented levels of financial leverage caused the failures that precipitated the global systemic crash is a central theme in most explanations. All of the various economic theories of why this happened, from the technicalities of security design (Gorton, 2009) to the failure of capitalism (Stiglitz, 2010) can be reduced to two competing hypotheses: a failure of market discipline or a failure of regulation and politics.

While still sifting through the wreckage and rebuilding the economy in mid July, 2010, the Congress passed the 2,315 page Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 to prevent a reoccurrence of this disaster. The disagreement in the debates regarding the appropriate policy prescription reflected the lack of a consensus on which of these two competing hypotheses to accept. The risk was that, following the precedent established in the Great Depression, politicians will blame markets and use the crisis to implement pre-collapse financial reform agendas and settle other old political scores. By having done just that, this Act  worsens future systemic risk.

That there was little or no market discipline is obvious. Contrary to the deregulation myths, regulation and politics had long since replaced market discipline in US home mortgage markets. Regulators didn’t just fail systemically to mitigate excessive risk and leverage, they induced it. This didn’t reflect a lack of regulatory authority or zeal, as politicians openly encouraged it.

The politically populist credit allocation goals that promoted risky mortgage lending, whether or not morally justifiable, are fundamentally in conflict with prudential regulation. The system of “pay-to-play” politically powerful government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) was a systemic disaster waiting to happen. The recent advent of the private securitization system built upon a foundation of risk-based capital rules and delegation of risk evaluation to private credit rating agencies and run by politically powerful too-big-to-fail (TBTF) government insured commercial banks and implicitly backed TBTF investment banks was a new disaster ripe to happen. Easy money and liquidity policies by the central bank in the wake of a global savings glut fueled a competition for borrowers between these two systems that populist credit policies steered to increasingly less-qualified home buyers. This combination created a perfect storm that produced a tsunami wave of sub-prime lending, transforming the housing boom of the first half decade to a highly speculative bubble. The bubble burst in mid-2007 and the wave crashed on US shores in the fall of 2008, reverberating throughout global financial markets and leaving economic wreckage in its wake. 

By the time the financial system finally collapsed bailouts and fiscal stimulus were likely necessary even as they risked permanently convincing markets that future policy will provide a safety net for even more risk and more leverage. Given this diagnosis, how to impose market and regulatory discipline before moral hazard behavior develops is the most important and problematic challenge of systemic financial reform.

The public policy prescription is simple and straightforward. Prudential regulation remains necessary so long as government sponsored deposit insurance is maintained, which seems inevitable. Prospectively the traditional regulatory challenge of promoting market competition and discipline while safeguarding safety and soundness remains paramount. But the prudential regulation of commercial banks needs to be de-politicized and re-invigorated, with greater reliance on market discipline where public regulation is most likely to fail due to inherent incentive conflicts. This means sound credit underwriting and more capital, including closing the off balance sheet loopholes typically employed by big banks and eliminating the incentives for regulatory arbitrage. Universal banking should remain, but divested of hedge fund and proprietary trading activity. In addition, firms that are “too big to fail” (TBTF) are probably too big to be effectively controlled by regulators and should either be broken up or otherwise prevented from engaging in risky financial activities by reducing or eliminating their political activities.

Most importantly, the two main sources of TBTF systemic risk and subsequent direct government bailout cost, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, no longer serve any essential market purpose. The excess investor demand for fixed income securities backed by fixed rate mortgages that fueled their early growth is long gone and now easily met by Ginnie Mae and Federal Home Loan Bank securities alone, as fixed nominal life and pension contracts have largely been replaced by performance and indexed plans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be unambiguously and expeditiously liquidated subsequent to implementing an adequate transition plan for mortgage markets.

Download the paper (1 MB pdf).

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Kevin Villani is former SVP/acting CFO and Chief Economist at Freddie Mac and Deputy Assistant Secretary and Chief Economist at HUD, as well as a former economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. He was the first Wells Fargo Chaired Professor of Finance and Real Estate at USC. He has spent the past 25 years in the private sector, mostly at financial service firms involved in securitization. He is currently a consultant residing in La Jolla, Ca. He may be reached at kvillani at san dot rr dot com.

Recession and Recovery

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One of the broad assumptions behind recessions and recoveries is that during the “boom”, excess capacity is built into the system as manufacturers & service providers expand to meet increasing needs (today, and in the future). During the recession, manufacturers & service providers pare back, leaving capacity idle.

Part of the reason that the recovery (typically) gains steam is that bringing back this idle capacity (both in physical and human capital) is cheaper than building (or training) new, and it allows the economy to “roar” back into high gear. In some high level sense WW2 leveraged all of the physical and human capital that was idled by the great depression; while huge plants were built and millions of workers mobilized much of the initial lift was caused by leveraging what we had that was unused at the time.

When I look at this “boom” and recession, however, from the point of view of the USA, it doesn’t seem that we over-invested in productive capacity. Much of the investment was in residential real estate and commercial real estate for distribution, retail and services.

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The FHA and Impact on Real Estate Values

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Today the FHA, the Federal Housing Administration, is a gigantic player in the residential mortgage business. The FHA guarantees mortgages against default, and allows purchases of homes with only a 3.5% down payment, and provides a rock bottom interest rate of near 5%. These lenient terms apply to virtually everyone, even those with poor credit scores and little equity in the home, which are highly correlated with default. This is in addition to the $8000 tax credit the US Government is issuing to first time buyers, which is boosting demand for these sorts of loans.

This article describes the measures that the agency is taking to reduce the odds of a bailout, but they don’t hit on the core issues of low down payments and not adjusting the interest rates to better reflect the risks on lower credit quality mortgages. These half-hearted measures require a tiny base of assets for mortgage originations (up to $1m from $250,000) and some changes to appraisals… the core issue here is that there were massive amounts of fraudulent mortgages that flooded into the system during the boom and when they went awry the brokers that backed them vanished into the night.

Many have pointed out that the FHA looms as a likely candidate for government bailout, such as this article from the Washington Post, titled “FHA’s Refusal to Seek Bailout Met With Skepticism”

FHA Commissioner David H. Stevens said Friday that the surplus fund set aside to cover unexpected losses on mortgages backed by the agency will fall below the 2 percent threshold required by Congress when the next fiscal year starts in October.

Although the reserves had remained well above the minimum required level during the housing boom, the audit last year showed they had shrunk to 3 percent as of Sept. 30, compared with 6.4 percent a year earlier. The fund’s value was estimated at $12.9 billion, down from $21.2 billion the previous year.

Many stories note that most of the loans that are being done today are backed by the FHA. From this article in the Wall Street Journal titled “No Easy Exit for Government as Housing Market’s Savior”

The Denver home lender sees every day how dependent the housing market has become on the government. At the height of the boom, just 20% of Universal’s mortgages were backed by the Federal Housing Administration, an arm of the government that guarantees loans to borrowers who can’t afford big down payments. Today, the FHA accounts for more than 80% of his business.

Also note that the US Government is buying most of the securities that are backed by the FHA. Private banks are not interested in purchasing securities with low returns and thus the government secures the loan on the front end, and then repurchases the securities on the other end.

At the Fed, the question of whether to start dismantling the scaffolding is a dominant one. Since the beginning of the year, the Fed has purchased $836 billion of mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae, the federal body that securitizes FHA loans. The purchases have helped push down interest rates on mortgages guaranteed by the firms from more than 6.5% last October to 5.15% today, according to HSH Associates, which tracks the mortgage market.

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