R21 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics: Housing DemandNávrat zpět

This article, based on an empirical analysis, discusses factors affecting property prices and tries to identify periods of property price overvaluation in the Czech Republic. To achieve this, the article uses both relatively simple approach using ratios related to the house prices (e.g. price-to-rent or price-to-income indicators) as well as international comparison and more advanced econometrical approach. Within this econometrical approach we apply both time series analysis for the Czech Republic as a whole and panel regression for the Czech regions. This analysis identifies overvalued property prices in 2002-2003 and 2007-2008. In 2007-2008, however, the rise in property prices was largely explainable by fundamentals, meaning that the price overvaluation in this period was considerably smaller than that in the first one. From the regional perspective, there is a higher degree of overvaluation in regions with higher property prices. The exception is Prague, which seems to be a "specific" region - partly due to the properties of the estimation technique.

On the background of current global mortgage crisis the article discusses the housing market theory and particularly the methods and indicators used for the evaluation of long-term sustainability of house price trends. The authors provide the time series of such indicators for selected OECD countries, critically examine the past research studies evaluating pre-crisis house price development and argue that house price falls present in many developed countries are more the causes than the consequences of mortgage crisis. The change in house price trends in 2007 in many developed countries could be thus interpreted as the result of the previous record house price growth, often labeled as a price bubble. In view of this hypothesis the authors try to assess the sustainability of house price development in the Czech Republic, using several indicators, error correction models and different data sources. The methods for construction of reliable house price indices are also discussed here. The results show that house prices in the Czech Republic could be above their "equilibrium" levels at the end of 2007 but this deviation was far lower than in countries like UK, Spain, Netherlands or Ireland.