Agreed but I would like to protect from a broader market down turn in general. I specifically think the majority of real estate, both residential and commercial, will become devalued.
Hedge Against Home Value
- Thread starter cfree5119
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Agreed but I would like to protect from a broader market down turn in general. I specifically think the majority of real estate, both residential and commercial, will become devalued.
why do you think your house will become devalued?
If that's your considered opinion, then why not put together a list of national and regional home builders, and take a small short position in each of them?
Sell your house and rent
Nationally, you need inflation of tangible assets to make capital gains. Rates at zero results in no significant appreciation, outside of an isolated asset bubble; events unrelated to yields. Low-rates facilitate the marginal-buyer, but only to the limits of a conventional mort (up to 500K). You fall into that category ($300-$400K).
IOW, you don't want rates at zero... but you don't want to lose the buyer in your demographic. You probably don't have the capital to hedge $300K in exposure, nor should you do to many factors; corr/tracking being two of them.
If you were on the sell-side trading mortgages you would sell the IO, but you're not. Don't hedge your home's value. You will curse yourself if you're down on marks, and there is no way to know if you're actually impacted at home, due to liquidity. Comps are basically worthless. So say you hedge in an ETF which rallies, and you won't want to cover (and hedge again?), and you're not to going to cash in the home. A second is dumb, as you won't come close to covering the rates on the cash you receive.
IOW, you don't want rates at zero... but you don't want to lose the buyer in your demographic. You probably don't have the capital to hedge $300K in exposure, nor should you do to many factors; corr/tracking being two of them.
If you were on the sell-side trading mortgages you would sell the IO, but you're not. Don't hedge your home's value. You will curse yourself if you're down on marks, and there is no way to know if you're actually impacted at home, due to liquidity. Comps are basically worthless. So say you hedge in an ETF which rallies, and you won't want to cover (and hedge again?), and you're not to going to cash in the home. A second is dumb, as you won't come close to covering the rates on the cash you receive.
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conventional thinking goes, rates won't rise until the economy improves, in which case you would expect your house to hold it's value or increase in value. Your mortgage makes you long rates, so I see no reason to do anyhing.
Then be honest with yourself. You're not hedging the value of your house, you're taking a direction bet on the market as a whole. Your house has next to nothing to do with it, because as was pointed out real estate is local and the correlation error between anything you buy and your house will be so great that again, you're basically not hedging anything. And in some places local really really means local. If you bought a house in San Francisco in 2007, you're up 25% right now. If you bought a house just 30 miles away in the suburbs of Antioch, you're down 40% right now. It's crazy to think you could buy any kind of hedge against your specific house with a broad REIT fund, and that's before you look at the divergence between residential and commercial price changes. So feel free to invest based on your feelings about what the market is doing, I for one think your analysis is pretty sound. Just don't fool yourself into thinking you're doing something safer like hedging when what you're really doing is making a directional call on a market.