I contributed the following article to the Financial Times, at ft.com/maverecon

The real estate roots of the crisis in the US

July 21, 2009 3:42 pm

Today’s guest blogger is Elena Panaritis,  an expert in property rights, creating markets in illiquid real estate assets, and public sector management.  She is also the author of Prosperity Unbound; Building Property Markets with Trust, which is definitely not one of those odious get-rich-quick-in-real-estate-without-capital-brains-or-effort books.  Instead it is a get real book for social entrepreneurs about how to turn real estate possessions into socially productive, and indeed also privately profitable, capital.

This Crisis Demands Non-Traditional Solutions to Get to a Path of Quick Recovery

By Elena Panaritis

Two years after it began, there is now a coalescing of opinion about the causes of the U.S. financial crisis and what should be done to resolve it, yet there is a serious element missing both in the causation analysis as well as in the prescriptive solution. This crisis, which has infected the global economy so severely, is very much a non-traditional one that calls for a non-traditional solution. The impact in the United States so far has been worse than anything since the Great Depression: unemployment reached 9.5 percent in June, up from 7.8 percent in January, home prices were down 27% at the end of the first quarter from their 2006 peak, and 1.5 million homes were in foreclosure.  After jumping by 30 percent in February, home foreclosure rates tapered off but are again on the rise. According to the New York Times, the loss in property value could total $500 billion.

There is general agreement that the financial crisis results from a variety of factors: an extremely low household saving rate in the United States; excessive public and private liquidity creation and a wave of cheap and easy credit which was directed into real estate speculation; proliferation of “subprime” mortgage loans to high-risk borrowers, interest rates kept too low for too long that further increased incentives to over-borrow; the failure of financial supervision and regulation. However, there is a much less obvious element that everybody is missing, that of a poorly defined and weak underlying asset namely real estate/property. Indeed, it is at the heart of the crisis. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link and the weak link here is the system used to define the asset of real estate/property in terms of use and cash flow, its supply, and pricing.

In this crisis, real estate assets were badly defined for the most part, making them less securely bankable and more susceptible to price manipulation and destabilizing speculation. That’s still true, yet no one is raising the issue.

Usually, economic crises result from bad regulation and over-liquidity in the financial markets (the first four of the five factors mentioned above). Economists usually address the demand side of the assets (i.e. how an asset is financed and the credit markets around it) (as opposed to the actual regulatory infrastructure that defines and creates assets to become securely tradable with reduced risk, that is, the supply side. In this crisis, the asset (real estate) was/is for the most part badly defined – and it is this side of the equation that needs to be examined rather than taken for granted.

The current economic crisis stems from the fact that the underpinnings of the market are either broken or rotted, and in some cases there are no underpinnings. That makes it a non-traditional crisis; what we are confronting is the direct result of inadequacies in upstream property rights. This crisis combines the original sin of badly valued properties with a financial system based on harmful, unproductive gambling and incentives to continue gambling. As a result, investors in mortgage-backed securities did not have enough, reliable information on the mortgage itself. They only had information on ratings of the derivative, but not of the actual underlying asset.

We cannot achieve secure derivative trading if the information on the underpinning asset is not standardized but oblique and difficult to find – because markets run on information. In the same way we understand the need to standardize derivatives, we must understand the need to do the same for the underlying real estate assets. While we have national and international trading in asset-based securities, the information on the assets themselves is localized, and the way it is collected and reported varies from county to county and state to state.

What, then, should be done? We need to treat this crisis as an opportunity not only to install a more rigorous regulatory regime for the financial sector, but also to listen to the non-traditional economists – that is practitioners of institutional economics. They will tell us that we need to overhaul the way property rights and property values are established in this country. We need a structural reform that establishes standards for how property is evaluated and how it is offered to the market. We need a standardized repository of information about the asset of property, so that no one has to search multiple places to make sure a title is good and that there are no outstanding liens dating back decades.  We need to ensure that all buyers can access information about the pricing of property. Let’s start with a consolidation of information county by county, and use the best standardized information we can find – typically from registries of deeds and from title insurance companies – to get things going.

The U.S. property rights system is severely broken. The incorrect valuation of land, properties, and thus mortgages is at the center of our current crisis, and if we don’t fix things so that mortgages are valued correctly we will not have addressed the root cause of why things are the way they are today.

Traditionally, economists are trained to assume that pricing in general is a point of equilibrium defined by almost perfect market forces, where the demand and supply meet and neither the buyer or seller has a huge informational advantage. The traditional model also assumes that markets are frictionless and transaction costs are near zero especially when we deal with the supply side. From that they continue to assume that systems (rules, regulations, norms) that define the tradability of assets are given and near perfect. But this is rarely the case. In reality the systems that define supply of land and real estate tend to be full of transactions costs and information leakages, and that makes it really difficult to follow the old maxim that a price or value based on how much one is willing to pay is necessarily the right price.

These are the same economists who, faced with a crisis, would concentrate on the downstream usage of an asset – that is, the asset’s treatment in the financial markets. They would typically pay little or no attention to the upstream definition of the asset – that is, the actual system that structures the supply of the asset – the pool of all assets ready to be traded in the market – before it enters the market. Their solutions would be all the traditional ones, that is, solutions that touch on the impacts of distorted financial markets, that is, markets for ‘downstream’ financial assets: macroeconomic stability, regulation of the financial sector, even labor regulations, and by taking these steps, they would consider transactions costs to be close to zero, and disregard societal and market wrinkles.

What about practitioners of institutional economics?  They would emphasize how the underlying asset is defined, whether all the characteristics that help determine its market price are clear, and how the original creation of the asset takes place.

And so, to whom do the powers-that-be turn for solutions in this non-traditional crisis? They are following the lead of the traditional economists and the conventional path of economic analysis.

The Obama administration’s economics team came in determined to get a handle on this crisis. There has been a concerted effort to lift the fog and manage as much as possible the systemic risk that has been created by panic over a suddenly uncertain future. The team has focused on policies to reduce uncertainty about the derivatives markets and restore confidence, to return banks to healthy levels of capital and bring tighter oversight to the derivatives markets.

These steps are needed, but they are not enough. Everyone has pointed to the greed of the financial sector, the manic behavior of banks and new lending institutions that continued to leverage up to take advantage of the spreads between their securitized assets and their ever-shorter funding maturities, the lax regulation of the derivatives markets, and the fact that almost anything could be bundled with anything else, no matter how heterogeneous – one security could include consumer debt, credit cards and home mortgages. Also there is a wide acknowledgment that when banks stop lending it both brings about a cyclical contraction and fuels a weakening of long-term productivity in any economy.

But is it enough simply to reduce uncertainty regarding the capitalization of banks? Does lifting the fog of uncertainty about the complex derivatives also cure the core problem?

No one is touching the roots of the crisis.

When Timothy Geithner, US Treasury Secretary, is asked about the signs of improvement, he points to impacts of the systemic crisis, such as unemployment, lending rates, and so on. He has yet to point to a single indicator that goes to the roots. Where is his explanation of what is being done to address the bad rules and regulations governing how property rights in real estate are established in the United States, which is the primary reason that all the systemic problems could bring us down the path to negative-equity mortgage loans? What does he have to say about long-term miscalculations of the value of mortgages on an asset – real property – that ought to be unambiguous and transparent in our market economy? What is going to be done to ensure that land valuations are not driven by guesswork?

Until the United States accepts that it has a badly flawed approach to establishing and verifying real estate property rights and to determining the valuation of property, until it puts in place a system that homogenizes and standardizes the underlying securitized assets of real estate and housing – the same way securities are required to be homogeneous prior to being traded in bundles – these underlying real estate assets will continue to be toxic. They may be less toxic, or more toxic, as the crisis ebbs and flows, but they will be toxic nonetheless – and they will be on the balance sheets of banks.

Let the traditional economists work on the things they understand. Meanwhile, let’s combine basic institutional economics with some practical reality and fix the broken system. It will take political will, strong leadership from a new and popular president, and a direct confrontation with the special interests that would like to maintain the status quo while continuing to get bailouts.

The property rights problem

Bailing-out banks won’t fix the US economy. We need to stabilise home prices and standardise the way we value property.

Have we analysed the roots of the current economic crisis or started at the middle? Is it really just the unregulated financial markets and over-liquidity, or have these factors compounded an already broken system? How can we say our securities are “secure” when they are valued incorrectly, are now priced negatively and the bottoming-out point is unknown?

America got into the crisis initially because real estate – and thus the mortgages on it – was valued incorrectly. No one knows the true worth of property in the US. In fact, there is often uncertainty about the actual physical boundaries, as well as other characteristics, of many properties – hence the entire antiquated industry of title insurance.

Think about when you buy a new or used car: no lender requires title insurance. Why not? Because there’s no doubt about the car’s provenance and ownership. US homeowners, though, are required to purchase this insurance to indemnify themselves against loss if the title is defective. Every time a house changes hands, there again are the surveyors out to check the property lines for the umpteenth time so title insurance can be written.

How, then, did today’s crisis unfold? Incorrectly valued mortgages became speculative financial instruments for trading, which makes it possible to drive prices up or down seemingly without limit. And, as they traded downwards, they of course took the price of real estate down with them. Meanwhile, lending banks went over, the precipice of insolvency because the liquidity on which they depend dried up, all because their asset-backed securities have little or no value or even negative value.

Remember, a mortgage is called a “security” because it is secured with a tangible asset. But if its value isn’t real, it can’t really be secure. That’s the starting point for a toxic mix. Throw in excess liquidity (from 2000 to 2006) and housing demand, misvaluations and subprime mortgages to an already overstretched housing and real estate market, and it begins to be deadly unstabilising. Price becomes dependent on speculation, rather than on the actual value of the home and land.

Giving money to the banks is not going to fix this problem. Home values will still be driven by speculation. What we need are deep regulatory changes to the current system that can help establish a secure and true market value of land and real estate and will help stabilise prices for today and the future. That can happen only when the rights on property are recorded in a standardised, transparent and trustworthy manner. Anything short of this is an invitation for more speculation.

The antiquated US system is ridiculously wasteful and does little to provide the full protection of property rights, and title insurance is a poor substitute for the property rights system American property owners need and deserve. The title insurance process is, of course a moneymaking proposition, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a major culprit in the incorrect valuation of real estate that has brought America and the world to the current crisis. It also slows the transfer of deeds, adds to the expense and thus makes the property market less liquid.

It’s no accident that the root of the crisis is in America. Other countries with sophisticated economies have reliable property rights systems that establish correct mortgage valuation. For example, there is rarely a question about the value of the underlying assets in Canada and Australia, two other countries where mortgages are traded as financial instruments. And the rest of the world hardly knows title insurance. In most countries, public registries keep records of property transfers over time and whether there have been other parties with interest (eg, laying claim to ownership) in a transparent and standardised manner. These registries have the final word, and if they make a genuine error there is a system of remediation.

One key to how things work beyond the US is the public nature of information about property. At the registry, part of that public information includes characteristics of real estate (legal, financial, boundaries, etc) that makes transparent the establishment of a price – that is, the property’s value. There is very little room for speculators to drive the valuation process into the toilet.

As the US government shells out additional hundreds of billions in bank bail-out money, and whatever other hundreds of billions are to come, it needs to make sure some of it is spent on providing citizen property owners and markets with real security over their property – their full money’s worth. It’s time to stop America’s wasteful and risky process. The first step: use some of the bail-out money to establish a regulatory infrastructure for real estate valuation in the form of a nationwide property registry system where titles are well established and transparent to everyone.

If your sinks started to overflow and your pipes were bursting, you’d call a plumber. What if he showed up with towels, threw them on the floor to sop up the water and handed you a bill for $700bn? You’d be flabbergasted.

America needs to fix the plumbing, not just throw towels on the floor. That will take replacing some of the old pipes, like the non-transparent property rights registration process, with ones that will protect property rights at much lower costs today. The US government owes this to its citizens and to the rest of the world who are suffering downstream from the American crisis. Surely it makes sense to invest some of that bailout money to address one of the root problems that has brought all of us to the brink?

It’s time for a structural reform of the system that secures rights on property and real estate – even in the least-secure neighbourhoods – and hence leads to correct valuation. Now is a great opportunity for the new president to make the “ownership society” into something more than a hollow phrase.

First 100 days:  A fix for the housing crisis

In his speech to Congress, President Obama spoke of how the proper response to the economic crisis is not just a matter of immediate fixes, but also an opportunity to make investments that will serve the nation’s long-term interests. The same idea should govern the housing recovery plan. Otherwise, we get nothing more than a crutch when we need a cure.

As much as short-term help is needed to keep more people from foreclosure, there is a big opportunity to get to the end of the crisis by starting at the beginning of the problem. The conventional wisdom is that subprime mortgages represent the beginning. In fact, the beginning goes back much further. The current crisis stems from the absence of a system that provides stability to the value of properties in the United States.

Instead, real estate “value” in the United States continues to be set through speculation, and that undermines the security – that is, the underlying asset – when mortgages are traded as part of complex financial instruments. We cannot ignore a simple truth of economics: if we are going to treat mortgages as securities, then they must be secured by the tangible asset: namely, land and buildings. To do otherwise has proven to be a recipe for disaster.

The opportunity before the U.S. government with a housing recovery plan is to set up a new system that will keep us from ever getting to this crisis point again. How? The devil is in the details.

It’s no accident that other countries, even those that trade mortgages as financial instruments (such as Australia and Canada) have avoided the levels of off-the-cuff valuation of property we’ve seen in the United States. The reason is that other countries have standardized the information needed to determine the genuine value of real estate and hence mortgage valuation.

This information – actual boundaries, property transfers, claims, liens, and so on – is made available to everyone. The system is sound and transparent. And where do they keep this information? In national property registries, which maintain all the data, in a standardized format, that buyers and sellers need to undertake transactions related to real property.

The United States has a broken registry system, and instead of ever fixing it allowed a title insurance industry to arise as a substitute. Title insurance is non-transparent and (at best) inconsistently regulated, yet it is the main system through which information about property valuation flows. Plus, you have to pay for the information. This leads to all sorts of problems, and fuels speculation.

The Obama Administration’s housing recovery plan ought to look forward. Help people facing foreclosure today, yes, but also establish a national, standardized property registry responsible for the collection of all titles and all information about characteristics of property. Even statewide registries would be a tremendous improvement.

The first step is to mandate an agency to gather whatever exists in state and local registries and title insurance companies around the country, no matter how inadequate, and centralize and standardize that information. Then, establish a mechanism for making this information available to all. Further, figure out how to fill in the missing information. Finally, create a system for the registry to provide remediation in the case of errors.

It is critical that we correct how the value of real estate is established. By finally securing the asset, we can guarantee long-term price stability and rid the system of the speculation that has put us in this crisis. Let’s look at the current housing crisis as an opportunity to make this long-term fix.

This isn’t about setting property prices now and letting them remain static. Rather, it’s about letting a dynamic property market flourish in a way that protects Americans from having to bail out banks or themselves in the future.

Bailouts; fragile confidence; falling stock markets; talking heads; criticism; applause; more criticism; Republicans; Democrats; Latvia’s economy collapsed; Citibank stock down to less than $3; fear; nationalizations; hope; speeches; uncertainty; and more bailouts. What is going on? How can we get out of this mess?

What is going on is exactly what everyone is trying to figure out. There is so much uncertainty out there that I would not be surprised if people started asking astrologists what will happen to their pensions and savings. So much effort is being put into reversing this crisis, yet things still look gloomy.

As I was writing my book and comparing the robustness of property markets and property rights systems in the United States and other countries I realized early on that the United States has a rather weak system for defining and stabilizing property rights. In such a context speculation is almost certain and of course can lead to destabilizing prices and push the entire market beyond its limits.

I strongly believe that the key challenge in our current crisis is to stabilize home and real estate prices. But no one seems to be attacking it head on.

Unfortunately, the weak U.S. property rights system is complemented with some private-sector risk management tools that seem only to increase the uncertainty as they muddle the supply. I talked about this topic 2 days ago on Radio http://www.archive.org/details/RadioInterviewFebruary242009

What needs to happen to stabilize home prices now and for the future? The first step is to reverse the trend toward property being a speculative entity. That will require consolidating in a standardized manner all information about the asset in a single property registry system. We can get the information to begin from the existing (less than ineffective) public registries and from title insurance companies.
This would be a better approach than one that concentrates only on the effects of the crisis, rather than the impacts. Instead of a focus on nationalizing the banking sector, let’s take the more effective – and less expensive – route of undertaking a deep reform of the public registry system and fix the valuation method of every home out there.

You may be interested in reading the following articles:

Nationalizing America’s Banks  (The Economist February 26)

The risks of a bust-up in Europe (The Economist February 26)

No “magic bullet” in Obama housing relief plan.  ( February 18)

Last December, I presented my book at the World Bank sponsored by the World Bank Institute. That talk was special not only because Francis Fukuyama was on the panel and presented a historic development of property rights in economies around the world, and not only because the auditorium was filled to standing room only, but also because Deborah Thomas was there. I wrote about Deborah in my book (chapter 5)
She is a woman from the old segregated and distressed neighborhoods of DC whose financial worth equaled a welfare check … back in the day. She lived with her five children in a housing project, and her mother lived in similar conditions (rent-controlled housing). This living arrangement was all that was offered in the market for people like Deborah: social housing; never owning her own home or apartment, but instead a government- controlled subsidized rental.
One night, Deborah’s home caught fire. She was seriously injured as she tried to rescue her children, one of whom was blinded that same night. After her house was burned she was then officially declared homeless. She had no choice but to move into her mother’s apartment at 14th and W Streets, NW, in DC (across from today’s well-known bookstore/café “Bus Boys and Poets”) – the same apartment she had been raised in as a child, in a building that had been rent-controlled since the 1970s.
But her mother’s building was “Condemned.” A notice glued on the front door of the building declared that it was unsatisfactory for living purposes and that the 150 units had to be vacated in 30 days, with families bussed to shelters.
Deborah and her family were victims of what I call “Unreal Estate” – property so burdened with regulations and unclear rights about usage and responsibilities that it render the asset illiquid.
Unlike so many people who feel powerless to do anything but accept this fate, Deborah researched the regulations, looking for ways the law might allow the tenants to have a choice to purchase and become proud owners of their apartments. She learned that the tenants had the right of first refusal. With her leading the way, the tenants exercised that right. Today, their building and each apartment are valued so much higher, now that they have been pulled out from under public housing regulation and have renovated.
Deborah is no longer on welfare. Instead, she is a proud Middle Class lady in a community that she cares about and to which she belongs. Ownership of her apartment provides a reason to strive, work, save, and invest, and offers a better future for her and her kids.
Deborah’s story is one of HOPE that became REAL CHOICE and has led to a new PROSPERITY.

Last week I gave a presentation to the IMF on how property rights issues have contributed to the current housing market crisis right here in the US.  Below I share with you a review by the IMF of the presentation and some of my thoughts on the subject:

“Elena Panaritis gave us a different perspective today, by analyzing institutional aspects of property markets. Her seminar covered a wide range of institutional problems in property rights, including often hard to anticipate property disputes that could turn real estate into what she called “unreal” or illiquid estate, and reforms to address them based on a recently published book (Prosperity Unbound: How To Transform Unreal Estate and Build Property Markets with Trust). Elena used examples from Latin America and Emerging Europe and discussed the reform program that she led with her team in Peru, as well as reforms currently in progress in Bulgaria.

Elena argued about the presence of problems with property rights even in developed countries, including in the US and in Europe. In the case of the US, some of these problems have come to the forefront during the current crisis, primarily in the so called “up and coming neighborhoods,” where many of the subprime mortgages were given.

She described in detail what she called “reality check analysis,” which is the first step of the reform process to create reliable property markets and includes: understanding the origins of the problem at hand and the institutions and organizations involved, analyzing the distortions at each break of the property rights system going as far back in history as needed, determining the players involved and their incentives, and finding out who are the winners and losers of the reform.

Elena, could you help us better understand the implications of your analysis for the current housing market crisis and its origins?”

Elena: “In brief, I believe this crisis thus far has been analyzed from the middle, leaving out the needed scrutiny of its origins. This leads to misunderstandings that make the crisis worse.

We have repeatedly heard about problems from over-leveraging and loose banking and lending regulation, all justified; we ought, however, to look at the original assets (property – real estate) and try to understand the characteristics of property markets and why we had faulty valuations that have led to negative real estate prices (banks demolishing foreclosed homes), as well as to have over 7 million US real estate owners whose mortgage values are higher than the actual values of their houses.

My analysis focuses precisely on defining “why” we got to such a miss-valuation.

Doing a review of the property market behavior throughout recent history, I have observed that the US has a rather weak institutional infrastructure when it comes to securing the tradability risk of real estate. Property rights in the US are not always as solid as many of us think they are, which distorts incentives and relative prices. There can always be considerable risk regarding boundaries, usage, eminent domain etc. Not all information is registered in the county registries, and so one has to do a long search and also purchase title insurance to accompany the final transaction. The end result is that some of the characteristics of real estate assets allow speculative bubbles. Property (being a tangible and finite asset, with the basic parameters transparent to the market players) usually functions as a catalytic asset in the financial markets, because of its relative stability and thus its valuation.

In the case of the US though, the valuation of property is very much based on the information provided by the private title insurance and not by the public registry. This is because the public registry is not able to provide such information, because its data is not complete enough to produce relative price analysis – plus the registry operates mainly as an archive. Multiple transactions on the same property and neighborhoods (in a highly mobile economy as the US) help the title insurance to operate as a proxy to a very weak registry system. Working in new areas with no previous transactions (undervalued neighborhoods because of housing project regulations etc) makes valuation relatively arbitrary. The liquidity surge of the early part of the 2000’s produced a speculative rise of prices in such neighborhoods, as there was no basis for objective valuations and relative prices were very much distorted (and continue to be).

Title insurance is not an ideal solution for a problematic property rights system, as it does not really secure property rights. A well functioning property rights system, such as the ones in Canada, New Zeland, and Australia, would do a better job.”