Home Is Where The Money Is

If it seems that home values represent more and more of your personal wealth, it's likely that you're right. A new study shows that for most of us real estate is plainly our largest financial asset, an asset which has grown by $1.5 trillion in value during just the past two years.

Housing's Rising Contribution, a new study written by Dr. Mark Zandi, co-founder of Economy.com and commissioned by the HomeOwnship Alliance, an industry group, provides some interesting reading.

"According to the Federal Reserve Board's Flow of Funds, households own over $12 trillion worth of housing and have $6.6 trillion in homeowners' equity. There is close to $90,000 in homeowners' equity in the average house and the median amount of homeowners' equity per house is estimated as close to $45,000. With the recent collapse in stock prices, housing has once again become the most significant asset in the household balance sheet."

"Indeed," says the study, "the blow to consumers from the plunge in stock prices since early 2000 has been at least partially offset by the strong increases in house values and homeowners' equity during the same period. The value of households' stockholdings have fallen by nearly $4 trillion since 2000, but homeowners' equity has risen by an estimated $1.5 trillion."

Unlike stock riches which are largely held by the upper crust, real estate wealth is widely distributed -- lots of people have an ownership interest.

"While approximately one-half of families have some stockholdings," the study explains, "only one-fourth of families have holdings worth more than $25,000. More than two-thirds own their own home, and approximately one-half of families have homeowners' equity that is greater than $25,000."

What we have seen in the past two years is a profound movement toward financial conservatism. People are voting with their dollars and their dollars are increasingly staying home. Meanwhile, dollars in other places -- notably speculative Wall Street -- have been disappearing.

None of this seems surprising. Given financial leverage, tax benefits, a growing population, declining interest rates, and local developmental restrictions it follows that rising home prices have been fairly routine in most areas. No less important, the benefits of property ownership are widely available -- unlike IPOs and such you don't need to be a corporate insider to gain from growing home values.

The Zandi report says that housing represented 40 percent of the economy's growth in 2001, double the usual level. This percentage may be seen as good news for real estate and it surely shows the importance of the housing sector, but it also suggests that much of the rest of the economy was substantially battered in 2001.