Consumers have taken a much more positive view of homeownership amid a recent meteoric rise in home prices. That’s raised fears that the self-reinforcing belief in always-rising home prices that helped inflate the housing bubble may again be taking hold.
But Robert J. Shiller, co-creator of the S&P/Case-Shiller Indices, writes in The New York Times that a survey he’s conducting provides three primary indications that Americans are still far from “irrationally exuberant” about the housing market: Price expectations are still far below where they stood during the housing boom; a substantially smaller proportion of people believe that homeownership is a superior investment; and a much larger proportion of buyers purchase homes for the purpose of renting them.
