Housing market needs a dose of deregulation

The US housing market is on fire, with the supply of available homes falling drastically short of pandemic-stoked demand. Worrywarts are calling it a “crisis” and circulating weird tales of buyer desperation — including one about a supplicant in Bethesda, Maryland who apparently offered to name her first-born child after a seller — and warnings of stunted recoveries. Or maybe the thing to fear is another speculative bubble, like the one that set off the 2008 global financial crisis. The better way to think about the hot market is more prosaic: Demand for houses is booming as the pandemic recedes, and supply can’t keep up because of both temporary and longer-term factors.
Short-term causes notwithstanding, the imbalance is likely to persist. So states and localities should use it as an opportunity to rethink regulations that make it harder to expand the supply of housing. Data shows that housing prices are soaring, growing by 13.2% for the year ending in March, according to the S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller Home Price Index. That represents the biggest increase since December 2005. Each of the 40 largest metro areas experienced price growth of at least 7% in March relative to one year ago, with prices in Phoenix and Austin rising by over 16%.
Demand for housing is booming. According to a National Association of Realtors survey, there were an average of five offers made for every home sold in April.
Houses stayed on the market that month by a median 17 days, down from 27 the previous year. New home sales are at their highest levels since 2007, and sales of existing homes are up, too.
Many factors are at work. Household balance sheets are in great shape thanks to the various economic stimulus measures passed over the past 14 months. While mortgage rates have risen, they are still near historic lows, fuelling home purchases in spite of higher prices. The average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage loan is around 3%.
The pandemic continues to affect the types of houses people want to buy. The National Association of Realtors survey reports that 60% of agents have buyers looking for work-from-home features like a home office, finished basement and more square feet. In November, Redfin reported that demand for second homes doubled relative to the previous year.
Surging demand is meeting limited supply. The share of houses that are unoccupied and on the market is at its lowest level since the 1970s. Another measure of supply asks how many months it would take to exhaust the inventory of existing homes for sale if the current sales pace keeps up. In a buyer’s market, it takes more than six months. In March, the AEI Housing Center reports that there were just 3.5 months of supply.
Pandemic-related safety protocols have slowed down the time it takes to build houses in some states. The surging price of lumber, another pandemic-related phenomenon, has also made it difficult to build. So has difficulty finding construction workers. Construction job vacancies were up 14 percent in March relative to February 2020, the month before the pandemic began. In April, construction-sector average wages grew at a 12.6% annual rate as employers hiked up pay to attract and retain scarce workers.
But housing-supply shortages can’t all be blamed on Covid-19. The main reasons for them predate the pandemic. It takes too long in many parts of the US to secure building permits due to increasingly onerous regulatory requirements.

—Bloomberg