Forecasting UK House Prices and Home Ownership

This report sets out a new approach to modelling the macroeconomic drivers of house prices and home ownership based on data from 1992 to 2014. This approach enables us to explore the drivers, outlook and policy options for the housing market in a more comprehensive way than most past studies. Our results illustrate how sensitive house prices and home ownership rates are to a range of different macroeconomic drivers, including the supply of housing, the cost of capital and people’s incomes. The report also diagnoses the underlying causes of recent trends—why have prices risen and why has the home ownership rate dropped? The answers are somewhat surprising in the context of the current public debate around housing, and have important implications for the appropriate policy response.

