ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses four countries: Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States. It looks at the homeownership rates in these five countries in 2013, Mediterranean Spain and Italy on top, with 78 per cent and 73 per cent respectively. Non-depository institutions only need a small amount of working capital to originate loans if they sell these loans in the secondary mortgage market as bonds or mortgage-backed securities. To explain house price development, both housing economists and the popular media typically looks at housing construction as well as the number of housing units compared to population size. Germany is the exception where the homeownership rate increased but mortgage debt and house prices remained somewhat stable. The common trajectory is widely shared, namely in the countries where mortgage securitization already existed or was introduced in the first years of the twenty-first century, for example Greece, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the UK.
