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#### Housing ownership and rent measures

 The ownership ratio is the proportion of households who own their homes as opposed to renting. It tends to rise steadily with incomes. Also, governments often enact measures such as tax cuts or subsidized financing to encourage and facilitate home ownership.

 The ownership ratio is the proportion of households who own their homes as opposed to renting. It tends to rise steadily with incomes. Also, governments often enact measures such as tax cuts or subsidized financing to encourage and facilitate home ownership. If a rise in ownership is not supported by a rise in incomes, it can mean either that buyers are taking advantage of low interest rates (which must eventually rise again as the economy heats up) or that home loans are awarded more liberally, to borrowers with poor credit. Therefore a high ownership ratio combined with an increased rate of subprime lending may signal higher debt levels associated with bubbles. The price-to-earnings ratio or P/E ratio is the common metric used to assess the relative valuation of equities. To compute the P/E ratio for the case of a rented house, divide the price of the house by its potential earnings or net income, which is the market rent of the house minus expenses, which include maintenance and property taxes. This formula is: $\mbox{House P/E ratio} = \frac{\mbox{House price}}{\mbox{Rent} - \mbox{Expenses}}$ The house price-to-earnings ratio provides a direct comparison to P/E ratios used to analyze other uses of the money tied up in a home. Compare this ratio to the simpler but less accurate price-rent ratio below. The price-rent ratio is the average cost of ownership divided by the received rent income (if buying to let) or the estimated rent that would be paid if renting (if buying to reside): $\mbox{House Price-Rent ratio} = \frac{\mbox{House price}}{\mbox{Rent}}$ The latter is often measured using the "owner's equivalent rent" numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It can be viewed as the real estate equivalent of stocks' price-earnings ratio; in other terms it measures how much the buyer is paying for each dollar of received rent income (or dollar saved from rent spending). Rents, just like corporate and personal incomes, are generally tied very closely to supply and demand fundamentals; one rarely sees an unsustainable "rent bubble" (or "income bubble" for that matter). Therefore a rapid increase of home prices combined with a flat renting market can signal the onset of a bubble. The U.S. price-rent ratio was 18% higher than its long-run average as of October 2004 (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco report). The gross rental yield, a measure used in the United Kingdom, is the total yearly gross rent divided by the house price and expressed as a percentage: $\mbox{Gross Rental Yield} = \frac{\mbox{Monthly Rent x 12}}{\mbox{House Price}} \mbox{x} 100%$ This is the reciprocal of the house price-rent ratio. The net rental yield deducts the landlord's expenses (and sometimes estimated rental voids) from the gross rent before doing the above calculation; this is the reciprocal of the house P/E ratio. Because rents are received throughout the year rather than at its end, both the gross and net rental yields calculated by the above are somewhat less than the true rental yields obtained when taking into account the monthly nature of the rental payments. The occupancy rate (opposite: vacancy rate) is the number of occupied units divided by the total number of units in a given region (in commercial real estate, it is usually expressed terms of area such as square meters for different grades of buildings). A low occupancy rate means that the market is in a state of oversupply brought about by speculative construction and purchase. In this context, supply-and-demand numbers can be misleading: sales demand exceeds supply, but rent demand does not. All text of this article available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).

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