ABSTRACT
The size of the owner-occupied sector in any country will depend upon the attributes of this tenure and the costs and benefits of these attributes for different groups of households compared with those of the other tenures available. Countries where the housing stock includes a high proportion of houses, where access to mortgage funding is easy and the transaction costs are low and in particular where the regulatory environment and government policy support owner-occupation compared with rental tenures can be expected to have high owner-occupation rates. Those where most dwellings are flats, funding is highly constrained, transaction costs are high and rental tenures are favoured by government will have much lower rates. Thus, owner-occupation rates can in principle vary enormously between countries and there is no particular reason to expect any consistency. There is no such thing as an optimal rate. Rather, how the specific attributes, incentives and constraints play out will determine what is likely to be the sustainable owner-occupation rate into the longer term.
