ABSTRACT
We have seen in Chapters 4 and 5 that home ownership has been a source of considerable capital gains over the past twenty to thirty years for those owners who did not enter the housing market or move upmarket at the peak in the late 1980s. House prices are always expensive relative to income, but while incomes rise, outstanding mortgage debt generally decreases over time. Eventually, unless household breakup, repossession or some other disaster intervenes, the owner pays off the mortgage and becomes an outright owner. There are currently 6 million outright owners in Britain today, most of them in their fifties or older, as Chapter 5 showed. Mortgaged owners also accumulate equity. But what happens to all this accumulated equity? How and when is it released and who benefits? This is the subject of this chapter.
