Housing Bubbles Essay

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Abstract Nowadays, the housing price in Hong Kong is the hot topic; people concern about it and think that the house price is increasing abnormally as a bubble. To investigate whether housing bubbles exists in Hong Kong; this paper will firstly introduce how the housing bubbles developed in Southeast Asian countries before 1997. Followed by the explanation why the bubbles burst during the Asian Financial Crisis. Lastly, some indicators are used to identify whether housing bubble exists in the housing market in Hong Kong now. 1. Features of real estate market According to the standard asset pricing model, the price of real estate depends on the discounted present value of its expected rents. The supply in real estate market is inelastic, and there are long construction lags since the land of supply is fixed. For the housing rents and prices, they are all demand driven, and mostly depend on the real GDP and anticipated real interest rates of the market. Moreover, in the housing market, there are imperfect information, supply rigidities and inconsistent financial markets. Therefore, the actual price of the property may deviate from its fundamental value, and then it may form a bubble. (Collyns, C. & Senhadji, A., 2002) 2. Housing Bubbles In The New Palgrave Dictionary (2008) Kindleberger defines a bubble as a sharp rise in price of an asset or a range of assets in a continuous process. With the initial rise, it generating expectations of further rises and attracting new buyers. (e.g. speculators) Also, Flood and Hodrick (1990) defines a housing bubble as a deviation of current market price of the property from the value implied by market fundamentals. 3. Five factors lead to housing bubbles (Lind, H., 2009) 3.1 The macroeconomic situation and policies Most of the bubbles start in an extreme boom period with unrestrictive macroeconomic policies. 3.2 The

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