MetaTOC stay on top of your field, easily

Housing Appreciation (Depreciation) and Owners' Welfare: An Alternative View

, ,

Urban Studies: An International Journal of Research in Urban Studies

Published online on

Abstract

Based on a lifetime consideration, previous research has extended Frank’s graphical model with borrowing, property taxes and moving costs to analyse the welfare effects of housing appreciation and depreciation, and has shown that appreciation can make homeowners worse off, but homeowners’ welfare cannot decrease with depreciation. The latter is counter-intuitive, especially for owners with a high portion of mortgage in a housing slump. Alternatively, this paper treats property tax as an annual taxation and measures mortgage loan as a portion of house value when it was purchased. It is shown that if a house owner adjusts his/her house size in response to a price change, then with a low mortgage loan (or no mortgage), the owner will be better off only when there is a large appreciation or depreciation, while he/she cannot be better off under depreciation if he/she bought that house largely via a mortgage loan.