Created in 1990

Co-ordinators

Andreja Cirman Faculty of Economics University of Ljubljana Ljubljana, Slovenia andreja.cirman@ef.uni-lj.si

Michael Voigtländer Institut der Deutschen Wirtshaft Köln Cologne, Germany voigtlaender@iwkoeln.de

News:

• Milestones in European Housing Finance
  The completed text includes a Forward by David Miles; an introduction and comparative analysis by Jens and Christine, 21 country specific chapters; a chapter from the EMF on European regulation and a concluding chapter by Jens and Christine.
  Everyone has worked together to get the publication to its final stages - and we are particularly grateful to Emma Sagor who has helped enormously with the editing and proof reading.   The index will be completed before the end of October and the book will be ready for printing.
  The book will be published on March 3rd 2016 and there will be a launch event either at the end of March or in early April in London. Everyone is welcome - in particular we hope authors will be able to come.

• New Coordinators
  We have been very pleased to welcome Andreja and Michael as a coordinators for the working group.

The Central Theme of the Working Group

• To initiate and stimulate research in housing finance: mortgage systems, mortgage loan types, debt, developer finance, risk management; regulation and government involvement
• To support the publication of research analyses and findings;
• To ensure an effective network among researchers; and
• To support the dissemination of knowledge about housing finance, mortgage systems, policy change and market development.

Numbers of people involved
There are over 100 people on the working group e-mail list, a large proportion of whom are active both in contributing to seminars and conferences and taking part in monitoring activities. A number of new people joined in 2014 and we hope they will take part in future events – as well as answer questionnaires where relevant.

Plans for the Working Group
We intend to launch the Milestones in European Housing Finance in March 2016 with a seminar in London.
We expect to run a workshop in Belfast.  At the EMF/ENHR workshop it was suggested that the working group might like to concentrate a bit more directly on evaluating national governments’ medium term responses to the financial crisis and the consequences for mortgage markets. This could be a matter for discussion in Belfast.

Activities in 2015
During 2015 the Milestones project has continued to dominate our activities with some 40 authors involved in updating and finalising their contributions. We are sorry that the book will not be published until 2016.  However as it was only a gleam in our eyes at Tarragona we have done well to get it to the printers in 2015. Moreover everyone who committed to write a chapter has done so. We can congratulate ourselves.
We had a really good workshop at the Lisbon conference - with some twenty papers.  Almost everyone who registered was able to come. Many of the papers continued the theme of country specific developments.  There were also papers on regulation; on affordable housing; and particularly on the role of owner-occupation, mortgage risks and particular mortgage market products. There was also some interest in supply side issues and development finance. We were very pleased to see so many regular attendees but also new members including from Ukraine, the USA and European housing and banking institutions.
The EMF/ENHR seminar (see News above) involved some dozen working group members with equivalent numbers from the EMF and their statistics group. We look forward to continued interaction.

Policy Implications
The analysis of how housing finance systems have developed over the last twenty five years -and especially since the financial crisis is both an evaluation of national and international policy since the deregulations of the 1980s and provides an indication of how the implementation of regulatory and other changes will impact on national housing markets and individual households’ aspirations.
The working group will continue to make regular contributions to the debates on privatisation and regulation as well as on the impact of subsidy changes on the capacity to meet housing objectives.