A safer way to invest in housing
Tired of the drudgery of finding, buying and managing an investment property? If the Australian Stock Exchange’s plans come to fruition, you will soon be able to get exposure to Australia’s $3.5 trillion residential real-estate asset-class without buying a home, paying stamp duties and land tax, or bearing the burden of maintaining and overseeing your property.
In fact, rather than investing in one home, with its many idiosyncratic risks (e.g., the local zoning, economic activity, and the specific pros and cons of the dwelling in question), you will be able to buy an exposure to an exceptionally well-diversified portfolio comprising literally millions of homes spread right across the country. And you will not own any of them. Seriously!
Perhaps most interesting of all, you will be able to make this investment for as little as about, say, $10,000. That is, one-fortieth the cost of buying a median-priced property outright. Over and above professional investors, this could be very attractive to mums and dads stuck in the rental market who are worried about the costs of home ownership outpacing the interest they earn on their savings.
Another benefit of these new products will be that they are likely to afford users superior “liquidity” – put differently, a better ability to enter and exit your holding – than the many months of inconvenience one can experience when disposing of a home.
How will this be possible? My best guess is that within the next six to 12 months Australians will be able to invest in capital city, or even national, residential property “index funds” available through the ASX, which will offer the capital growth and net rental returns generated by houses in those cities. This will be similar to putting money in an index fund that tracks the performance of the Australian sharemarket index. The key difference is that returns will now be tied to a house price index.
The ASX’s market has been some time in the making as it gets the various approvals and the capital city and national house price indices ready before the formal launch. But it should happen relatively soon.
Index-linked portfolios have two chief advantages. First, they offer vastly greater diversification than owning an individual share or residential property, and this means that they should have lower risks, all other things being equal.
When Rismark measures the risk of a typical single-family home in Australia over the last 20 years or so, we find that its returns vary by around 15 to 20% per annum. This is on par with the risk you see in the sharemarket. In contrast, a nationally diversified house price index has radically lower risk, with volatility of just 3 to 5% per annum.
The second obvious advantage of index funds is that they tend to have much lower costs. For example, an active Australian equities managed fund that buys and sells a concentrated portfolio of stocks often charges its investors 1 to 2% per annum. Index-linked funds, on the other hand, have fees that are a fraction of this.
I expect the same to be broadly true in the residential property space. The new index-linked products should offer investors total costs that are significantly lower than owning an investment property outright, and with much less day-to-day hassle.
A final important opportunity associated with these products will be “risk management”. About 60 to 70% of all household wealth is locked up in residential housing. It is often the single largest investment many families make during their lifetimes.
Yet there is currently no way to insure against the risk of major house price falls. With so much talk swirling around house price bubbles, there are presumably many households out there that might like to take out a bit of insurance against the risk that their most important investment plummets in value. This is all the more germane in a rising interest rate environment.
In addition to going “long”, or investing in, the index products I have discussed above, you will also be able to take the other side of this transaction and go “short”, or benefit from a fall in the value of the index. So if, for instance, you are worried about
Opportunities to hedge, or reduce the risks associated with house price falls, have for a long time been recognised as one of the biggest “missing markets” around the world today. This point was hammered home during the global financial crisis, when US and UK house prices declined by 30% and 15% respectively. And in the US and UK, index-linked residential property markets have been successfully established, allowing institutions to reduce the risk of house price falls.
Looking through the cycle, why might one choose to allocate a percentage of a portfolio (e.g., your self-managed super fund) to an index Australian residential property?
As I noted above, residential property is Australia’s largest investable asset-class and about 2.5 times the value of all securities listed on the ASX. Yet investors currently have few ways to invest in it on a truly “diversified” or cost-effective basis. Round-trip transaction costs can frequently be between 12 and 13%. And while you can buy an individual home, you cannot currently get access to a portfolio of housing that has exposure to every city in
A national index of residential property has low measured risks and has historically displayed about one-fifth the volatility of Australian shares, which has traditionally been the most popular holding in investor portfolios.
On a risk-adjusted basis, residential property has, as a consequence, actually outperformed Australian shares, global shares, 10-year Australian government bonds, and listed property trusts over the past 28 years, which represents the longest period over which we can credibly compare returns.
Australian housing has also proven to be a resilient performer throughout all of the major crises over the last three decades, including the 1987 stock market crash, the 1991 recession, the 1997-98 Asian and LTCM crises, the 2001 tech wreck, and the 2007-09 GFC.
During
Since 1982, a national index of residential property’s rolling three-year capital or total returns have never entered negative territory. And during that especially turbulent episode between 2007 and 2010, a nationally diversified portfolio of housing significantly outperformed Australian shares, global shares, commercial property, hedge funds and private equity.
In recent times, Australia has had among the strongest population growth in the developed world, with the Treasury projecting that our population will rise by 16% between 2010 and 2020 to 25.7 million people, and increase to 35.9 million people by 2050. Treasury and ABS forecasts indicate that Sydney and Melbourne will each have about 7 million to 8 million people living in them within four to five decades.
As the population expands in metropolitan markets it is becoming increasingly difficult to bring new housing supply online, as evidenced by the flat absolute volume of housing starts over time. ANZ and Westpac estimate that
This is why independent experts, such as the National Housing Supply Council and the Commonwealth Treasury, forecast that robust housing demand coupled with continued housing supply constraints will result in a growing structural shortage in the national dwelling stock.
Christopher Joye is a leading financial economist and works with Rismark International. Rismark and RP Data provide house price analytics products, and solutions that enable investors to go long and/or short the housing market. The above article is not investment advice. You can follow Christopher on twitter at @cjoye or read his blog.
