Shiller: todavía no se emocionen demasiado por sector vivienda

Genevieve Signoret & Patrick Signoret

Robert Shiller advierte que los indicadores económicos no apuntan a un nuevo boom en vivienda. Las cifras de precios no indican ningún camino futuro claro para los precios, dice, ni de subida ni de bajada (NYT).

In short, it is hard to find an exact cause for the rebound in home prices. But that isn’t unusual — we hardly ever know the real causes of major changes in speculative prices. Yet we do know that any short-run increase in inflation-adjusted home prices has been virtually worthless as an indicator of where home prices will be going over the next five or more years.

There is a good deal of short-run momentum in home prices — they tend to keep going in the same direction for a year or maybe more. But those prices have generally reverted to the mean fairly quickly, in inflation-corrected terms. The upswing in home prices from 1997 to 2006 — up 86 percent, in real terms — was an anomaly. And that upswing was almost completely reversed by 2012. We certainly can’t rule out another boom. It’s possible that the 20th-century pattern of real home prices, which typically hugged the historical mean, has disappeared. Perhaps people are more speculative in their thinking, after the recent roller-coaster ride, and more prepared psychologically to buy into a bubble. But I wouldn’t put any money on that.

History doesn’t suggest that another big bubble will come so fast. In fact, before the most recent one, the United States had had only one major national home price boom in the last century, when real prices rose a total of 68 percent from 1942 to 1953.

[…] I can’t offer any clearer picture, and I don’t see a solid basis for anyone else to do so, either.