Academic literature on the topic 'Owner occupier (homeowner)'

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the risk factors in homeowners from the individual household’s perspectives within the owner-occupied housing sector of The Netherlands. Risk in home ownership from mortgage providers’ perspectives has received tremendous attention than individual home owner’s perspectives in existing literature following the financial crisis in 2007/2008 within the euro zone. Design/methodology/approach The paper adopted a broader review of extent literature on the different concepts and views on risk in homeownership. These concepts are unified into a framework that enhances our understanding of the perceived sophisticated risk in owner-occupier with focus on The Netherlands. Findings From the perspective of the homeowner, two main types of risks were identified: default payment and property price risk. The paper has unearthed a quantum number of factors which underline the above risks. These factors relate to the initial amount of mortgage loan taken out, the future housing expenses and the income development of the owner-occupier. Family disintegration is identified, as one of the main causes of mortgage default and that of property price risk are mainly influenced by income levels, interest rates and conditions in the social and private rental sectors. Research limitations/implications Findings of the paper are based on review of the extant literature in the context of the Dutch housing market. Possible rigorous situational analysis using other tools are recommended for further research. Originality/value This paper contributes to the much needed body of knowledge in the owner-occupied sector and provides a better understanding of risk in home ownership from the individual perspectives.

Neighborhood democracy was introduced into urban China in the early 1990s as a way to manage the social conflicts associated with the housing reform. Based on a case study of Dragon Villas, Beijing, this paper explores the causes, processes, and consequences of neighborhood democracy at the microlevel from a longitudinal perspective. Three insights are particularly noteworthy. First, the decrease in rental revenue and occupancy rate and the arrival of Chinese owner-occupiers contributed to the emergence of neighborhood democracy in Dragon Villas. Second, the establishment of a homeowner association, far from ending in the conclusion of neighborhood democratization, was only a first step. Furthermore, conflicts between the developer and the homeowners, and among homeowners, played a crucial role in lengthening the process of neighborhood democratization. Third, democratic self-governance resulted in improved governance, a more diverse built form that articulates individuation through consumption, and changes that reflect the importance of privacy and exclusivity.

The housing sector is responsible for a more than a quarter of the total final energy consumption in the EU. As the majority (70%) of the EU-housing stock is owner occupied and largely consists of single family dwellings it is understandable that many countries focus their energy saving policies on homeowners. Complementary to the national policy frameworks, regional and local authorities implement locally based policy instruments targeting specific groups and individual homeowners. In order to enlarge the effectiveness of their policy instruments and to reach the energy saving goals, frontrunner local authorities in particular are searching for ways to reach homeowners. Consultancy centres and pop-ups can be a way to make individual homeowners more aware about their energy use and stimulate them to apply low carbon technologies. The research results not only show that a wide range of business models are available to develop, structure and organise these consultation centres and pop-ups, but also that they indeed could play an important role in accelerating the energy performance of owner occupied housing. Through a pop-up or consultancy centre, public and private parties can join their forces to reach, stimulate and support the individual needs and wishes of homeowners during their customer journey to realise an energy efficient dwelling.

Purpose Even though housing prices in Germany are low by international standards, housing in urban areas has become less affordable. Since 2018, certain families aspiring to become homeowners may apply for a capital subsidy (Baukindergeld) that contributes to their down-payment. This paper analyzes whether this subsidy is an appropriate policy instrument to achieve the desired goals. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents an equilibrium model with two types of households (low- and high-income) and two types of houses (low- and high-quality) to examine equilibrium prices before and after the introduction of a subsidy. Findings This subsidy not only makes owning less affordable for the lower-income household but also increases the prices of more expensive houses that are not within reach of lower-income households. Research limitations/implications Because this policy has just come into effect in 2018 and no data are available yet, the implications of the model are yet to be tested. Practical implications The implications of the subsidy run counter to its intentions as house prices will rise even further. Other policies or fewer regulations for new construction may be more effective. Social implications An instrument aiming to relieve financially weaker families, this subsidy will increase prices for all house types, assuming continuing supply shortages observed in the German urban housing markets. Originality/value This is the first paper on Germany’s new homeownership subsidy. The model is general enough to be used with any explicit demand and supply functions and is thus applicable to other markets with low supply elasticities.

We consider a proposal that reduces by half the taxes on homesteaded properties and replaces the lost revenue by increasing the base and rate of the state sales tax. We develop a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model and a microsimulation model (MSM) to analyze the economic and welfare effects of such a proposal if adopted in Georgia. The results from the CGE model suggest that the proposed reforms have a substantial negative effect in percentage terms on Georgia’s economy. The MSM suggests that such a policy has no effect on the distribution of consumption by income class but increases the percentage of owner-occupied housing relative to rental housing by 20 percent in the aggregate.

The institutions for financing owner-occupied housing have not progressed as they should, and the financial innovation that has followed the financial crisis of 2007-2009 has not been focused on improving the risk management of individual homeowners. This paper lists a number of barriers to housing finance innovation, and in light of these barriers, the problems of some major innovations of the past and future: self-amortizing mortgages, price-level adjusted mortgages (PLAMs), shared appreciation mortgages (SAMs), housing partnerships, and continuous workout mortgages (CWMs).

AbstractTo maintain their standard of living during retirement, it is often assumed that individuals need to save enough to replace 75–80% of their final pay. This paper develops a replacement rate measure that better corresponds with a replacement of consumption by properly accounting for savings, taxes, and owner-occupied housing. Savings and investment behavior judged by standard analysis to be inadequate is shown to result in high real consumption during retirement relative to pre-retirement consumption. For example, the simulated savings and investment behavior of single individuals in this study results in retirement income of about 60% of final earnings, well below the typical adequacy threshold of 75–80%. However, this corresponds to replacing about 90% of pre-retirement consumption for renters and over 100% for homeowners who have paid off their mortgage.

Housing consumption has been rising throughout the post-war era in Norway. However, at the end of the 1990s there was a decline in consumption among young age groups. This tendency is confirmed by newer data: consumption among younger households has stabilised at a lower level than used to be the case. Less of these households are owner-occupiers and they live in smaller dwellings compared to fifteen years ago. In this paper the life course paradigm is used to explain these consumption changes. We find no signs of altering housing preferences among today's youth. The reduced housing consumption among this group can instead be seen in relation to new ways of organising the life course. Postponement of important life events such as completing one's education, entering the labour market, and starting a family of one's own will also postpone the point at which one becomes a homeowner for the first time. The observed decline in housing consumption among young household can, in other words, be understood as a delay in consumption. New life courses among today's youth entail new ways of adapting to the housing market.

Web portals have the potential to promote sustainable environmental ideas due to the capacity of digital media, such as easy accessibility, openness, and networking. Local authorities (LAs) are responsible for activating carbon savings in homes, and they are key actors when it comes to providing neutral information to their citizens. Local authority web portals may thus create environmental awareness, particularly regarding owner-occupied single-family home renovation. Nevertheless, the experiences of LAs developing web portals have rarely been studied. Therefore, this paper analyses the development process of various LA web modules and investigates how LAs foster modular web portals to stimulate the adoption of home renovation with parameters to assess LAs’ actions in terms of the management of web-modules development. A homeowner renovation journey model is applied to map current local authority developments. Case study research and interviews were done to analyse and evaluate the adoption of modular web portals developed and tested by six local authorities in four countries in Europe. Based on the development and use of the modular web portal, lessons have been derived emphasising the importance of co-creation, integrating with offline activities, and a strategic management plan.

AbstractComparative welfare and production regime literature has so far neglected the considerable cross-country differences in the sphere of housing. The United States became a country of homeowners living in cities of single-family houses in the twentieth century. Its housing policy was focused on supporting private mortgage indebtedness with only residual public housing. Germany, on the contrary, remained a tenant-dominated country with cities of multi-unit buildings. Its housing policy has been focused on construction subsidies to non-profit housing associations and incentives for savings earmarked for financing housing. The article claims that these differences are the outcome of different housing institutions that had already emerged in the nineteenth century. Germany developed non-profit housing associations and financed housing through mortgage banks, both privileging the construction of rental apartments. In the United States, savings and loan associations favored mortgages for owner-occupied, single-family house construction. When governments intervened during housing crises in the 1920/1930s, they aimed their subsidies at these existing institutions. Thus, US housing policy became finance-biased in favor of savings and loan associations, while Germany supported the housing cooperatives.

La stratégie «Adequate shelter for all and sustainable settlements development in an urbanising world» adoptée au sommet mondial Habitat II d’Istanbul de 1996, traduite dans les Objectifs du Millénaire pour le Développement et maintenant dans les Objectifs de Développement Durable, vise à fournir un logement décent au plus grand nombre de ménages dans les villes du monde et celles d’Afrique Subsaharienne en particulier. La crise du logement caractérisée par les conditions abjectes dans lesquelles la majorité des ménages des villes d’Afrique subsaharienne se logent, devient ainsi un problème majeur auquel la littérature spécialisée promeut généralement, parmi tous les modes d’occupation du logement, l’accession à la propriété comme la panacée. En supposant que cette dimension de la crise du logement ne peut s’expliquer que par les comportements résidentiels des ménages généralement autopromoteurs de leurs logements en Afrique de l’Ouest, et à Lomé la capitale du Togo en particulier, cette thèse de doctorat vise à répondre à la question générale de recherche suivante : Les choix résidentiels à Lomé, en particulier le choix du statut d’occupation du logement, sont-ils exclusivement influencés par le profil des ménages occupants? Par une approche mixte d’écologie urbaine basée sur des analyses croisées de régression logistique multinomiale appliquées à trois sources de données (RGPH4 de 2010, QUIBB de 2011, TERRAIN 2013) étayées par l’analyse biographique relative aux stratégies résidentielles d’un échantillon de 411 ménages participants dans quatre quartiers de Lomé, choisie comme base empirique, la recherche a plus ou moins confirmé les hypothèses émises a priori par les résultats principaux suivants: En lien avec la faible mobilité résidentielle générale qui caractérise les pratiques résidentielles à Lomé, les ménages choisissent, en élaborant des stratégies «de petits pas», leur statut d’occupation du logement suivant des trajectoires résidentielles surtout ascendantes, en fonction plus de leur profil démographique (âge, genre, statut migratoire et matrimonial, type et taille) que de leur statut socioéconomique (revenu, emploi, éducation). Ces choix résidentiels sont également déterminés par les attributs des logements (typologie, localisation et accès aux services de base) constituant les parcs résidentiels existants. Les ménages propriétaires de Lomé, souvent biparentaux, sont plus âgés, plus larges que les ménages locataires et hébergés. Les natifs de la ville et les migrants de longue date sont plus enclins à être propriétaires et durablement hébergés que les nouveaux arrivants. Globalement plus fortunés que les hébergés, les propriétaires ne sont pas forcément plus nantis et plus éduqués que les locataires. L’habitat de cour, habitation multifamiliale majoritaire dans le parc résidentiel de Lomé, bien qu’il abrite des ménages de tous les statuts résidentiels, il est surtout réservé aux locataires. La thèse suggère que des programmes accrus de financement institutionnel du logement, de rénovation générale du parc résidentiel existant et de production d’une version améliorée de l’habitat de cour, avec l’assistance technique publique, contribueront à fournir un logement décent au plus grand nombre de ménages qu’ils soient propriétaires, locataires ou hébergés, à Lomé et ailleurs dans les villes d’Afrique de l’Ouest, conformément au paradigme actuel du développement durable des établissements humains.
«Adequate shelter for all and sustainable settlements development in an urbanizing world», strategy adopted in 1996 at the World Summit Habitat II of Istanbul and expressed in the Millennium Development Goals and now in Sustainable Development Goals, aims to provide a decent housing for the greatest number of households in the world and especially in sub-saharian African towns. Since then, access to adequate housing becomes an important issue for housing research in developing and sub-Saharan African countries where most of households still live in abject conditions of lack adequate water and sanitation services which, among others, typify the acute housing crisis they are facing up to. Housing policies and literature generally promote homeownership as the panacea to solve this size of the housing shortage. Assuming that this housing crisis in West Africa, especially in Lomé the capital of Togo, should be explained by the residential behavior of the households, who are self-help promoters in majority, this doctoral thesis try to answer the following general research question: Are the residential choices in Lomé, especially tenure choice, exclusively influenced by the occupier households’ characteristics? By a mixed approach of urban ecology based on multinomial logistic regression cross-study analyses applied to three data sources (RGPH4 2010, QUIBB 2011 and 2013 field survey data) supported by the life histories concerning the residential strategies of a sample of 411 households in four areas of Lomé chosen as empirical basis, the research confirms more or less the assumptions made, by the following main results: In connection with the general low residential mobility that characterizes the residential patterns in Lomé, households make their tenure choices through especially upward trajectories by developing strategies of «small steps», more according to their demographic profile (stage of life cycle, age, gender, migratory and marital status, type, size) than their socioeconomic status (income, employment, education). These residential choices are also determined by the characteristics of the existing residential parks (typology, location, access to basic services of housing). We find that owner-occupiers are often bi-parental households headed by men, older and larger than renter and free-holder households in Lomé. Native and long-term migrant households are more likely to be homeowners and long-term sharers than those who recently migrate. Homeowner households are overall well-off than free-holders, but they are not necessary wealthier and better educated than the renters. The thesis also shows that family house which mainly makes up the residential park of Lomé, is especially kept for renters, although it shelters households of all the tenures. We suggest that steady programmes of housing finance systems extended to all the sectors of the society, concentrated on the access of the current housing stock to basic services and on the supply, with the public technical support, of an improved version of family house, will largely contribute to offer a decent housing to most of the households in Lomé as elsewhere in West African cities, whether they are owner-occupiers, renters or sharers.

This chapter examines pre-regeneration estates as valued places with reference to residents’ place attachment. Social tenants and owner-occupiers were attached to their homes as domestic spaces, to their blocks of flats/rows of houses, and to their estates as neighbourhoods – not ‘sink estates’. These were valued and valuable places where long-term residents developed traditional place belonging and a sense of community. Ontological security was rooted at the home scale in solid buildings and domestic self-provisioning (Pahl), and at the block and neighbourhood spatial scales in residential longevity and accumulated local social capital (McKenzie). Residents, especially working-class women, had built up trusting and caring relationships with their neighbours over years of co-residence. Neighbourliness was enhanced by estates’ design features, such as balconies, courtyards, and green space. By purchasing their homes under the Right-to-Buy (RTB), owners deepened their spatial roots, and hence the RTB operated as a buy-to-stay mechanism. Incoming middle-class market-homeowners (gentrifiers) expressed elective belonging, rather than traditional belonging, although they also began to develop local social ties. Despite neighbourhood conviviality, London estates do not form cohesive urban villages as identified during the early post-war period (Young and Willmott), but instead are complex socio-demographic places in terms of ethnicity, age, tenure, etc.