餐馆是房地产市场的晴雨表。随便在伦敦、纽约和香港的富人区或者是法国的任何高档住宅区的市场转转，看看当地的餐馆，最好的餐馆几乎都是人满为患；其它餐馆则不尽如此。
到曼哈顿、切尔西（Chelsea，位于伦敦）与香港中环(Central Hong Kong)等上好地段的餐馆用餐的人，自我感觉比两年前钱包更鼓了，当时低迷的经济重挫了他们的各种投资，尤以他们名下的房产为甚。随之而来的金融市场反弹让他们自我感觉大为纾困。鉴于金融市场和高档住宅之间的超强关联度，百万美元以上的住房价格随之水涨船高也就不足为怪了。
全球范围的地产商和高档房主也一样感同身受：房地产市场已经重新走上正轨，某些地方已经把房价推回、甚至超过了2007年的历史高点。这让人对市场乐观人士的话泼凉水似乎感觉有些内心不安。如今房地产市场可能重新向好——目前房价已经从2008年末的谷底反弹——但将来情况未必会如此乐观。
事实上，虽说几乎全球各国的房地产市场在过去的一年都呈现了温和增长，但现在却担心它们可能会随经济一起步入可怕的"二次探底"。在经受了金融危机的打击后，至少多数房地产市场已经企稳，部分市场甚至出现了强劲反弹。但是，认为情况依然脆弱者越来越多。英国皇家特许测量师学会(Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors)的报告称：其成员掌握的数据表明房价更多的是下跌，而非上涨，对购房者的问卷表明其购房意愿下降，迫使房价进一步下行，并预测2010年全年房价将同比下跌5%，2011年将继续下行。在美国，艾伦•格林斯潘(Alan Greenspan)就房价出现"小探底"（small dip，多数经济学家也如此预测）表达了同样的关注。他认为此举将引发丧失抵押品赎回权(译者注：foreclosures Foreclosure，指无法支付按揭，银行收回房屋)的大量出现，但房价"小探底"最终能够自我修复。
就房价的决定因素，目前主要有两大学派。评级机构标准普尔(Standard & Poor's)欧洲区的首席经济学家让-米歇尔•西克斯(Jean-Michel Six)采用金融市场的视角分析房价。在他看来，我们或许还未曾看到1997至2007年房地产泡沫所造成的失衡状况彻底得以修正，如不断下降的购房能力以及飞涨的房价租金比。房地产市场与其它金融市场大同小异：价格预期由正常购买力比率不断推动房价上涨。但是，房价通过均值回归(mean reversion)必然回到正常水平，从而造就特定的周期性房地产的繁荣与萧条。
相反，国际房地产咨询结构第一太平戴维斯(Savills)的主管卢西安•库克(Lucian Cook)则更多地倚重房地产市场自身的供求基本面，但他同样持悲观态度。他强调目前房地产市场需求疲软，而且他辩称"这更大程度与总体经济形势有关，一旦收入前景更趋悲观，购房意愿会出现拐点"。他补充说："房价变动可以造假，但房屋交易量从来不会，而且目前房价同比去年要低多了，即便抵押贷款的供应状况已大为好转。"
当然，经济驱动派与房地产供求派两派都不错。房价的变动永远是价格预期和房地产本身的基本面相互作用的产物。房地产市场受完全不同的两大力量影响：安全、有利可图的投资意愿以及居有定所的需要。这些动机在不同的时间、不同的地区扮演着不同的角色。全球没有统一的房地产市场。有些因素是普遍性的：信用紧缩重挫了消费者信心，并影响了房贷的获取。但是，世界各国采用的一揽子刺激方案，以及采取居者有其屋的措施在总体上稳定了局势。有几个国家采取的刺激措施直施惠于购房者，如美国实行的联邦课税扣除法(tax credit)。但是，展望未来10年，不同国家针对房地产市场的做法很可能与信用紧缩前10年一样千差万别。
有些国家（如西班牙、爱尔兰和迪拜）的房地产已经存在泡沫。它们房地产市场的活跃度很大程度由买家造成，他们把房产当作诱人的投机而非居所。他们期望在很短时间内把房子卖给其他买家，或者是套现，原因是看到房价不断上涨，意欲再次购入新房。建筑商也急着来凑这个热闹，建筑业的火爆随之而来。在这些国家的房地产市场中，泡沫的破裂导致住房供应持续过剩，只有待积压房屋全部消化后，持续性的复苏方才可能。每一次复苏都是投机商和金融机构处理掉手中积压存货的大好机会。
在其它一些经历房地产大涨的国家（如英国和法国），投机和供求基本面都在其中起作用，但两者之间较为平衡。多数人购房用于自住，而非伺机出售。不难理解，房价上涨是较低的名义上的和实际上的利率（即剔除掉通货膨胀因素后的利率）的结果。在这些国家，房价上涨同样由称心房屋以及与此相对应好地段的匮乏所推动。房价与各类资产市场一样，可能是过高了一点，但是，高过最新均价的房价与房价完全脱离经济基本面的泡沫完全是两回事。
如果基于房价与收入比例的指标已达历史高位——而且多数情况往往如此——基于月平均支出（决定多数家庭的购房能力）的指标则仍然相对合理。在英国，房贷支出占工资的比率已降至历史平均值以下——这对于能得到更低房贷利率的购房者来说是个重大利好，虽然他们往往是已是有房一族或者自身存款较多。
Jon Hunt是地产经纪商Foxtons的创始人，2007年，他准确地预测到了房地产市场的见顶，并以超过3.5亿英镑卖掉了伦敦的房地产中介公司。他说这次房地产市场的低迷与20世纪90年代初的狂泻完全不同，当时飞涨的利率对于许多房产拥有者来说是个梦魇。目前已投身房地产投资的Hunt总结说："即便市场暂时依然找不到前进的方向，但真正灾难性的打击已经过去。我们一直在购入有升值潜力的新房，并将继续购入。目前的伦敦是个非常棒的宜居城市，这儿的住房供给严重不足。"
在德国和瑞士这样的国家，居家用房产的供求关系始终居于首位，对于这两个国家的个人来说，投资动机从来不是决定性因素。只要不出现飞涨的通货膨胀，只要土地供应充足，房屋就只是作为居所，而非金融工具。年轻人更倾向于租房，业主自住代表了只是一小部分人拥有自己的住宅。所以这两个国家未来的房地产市场与过去一样乏善可陈。
美国是全球最大的房地产市场，它与欧洲市场一样，也并非是单一市场。在不同的地区，房地产市场行为涉及的投机动机与经济基本面大相径庭。有些地区（如佛罗里达州）相信房价铁定会上涨的计划外购房者期望能很快倒手获利。有些地区——那些次贷丑行(subprime scandals)最肆虐的内陆城市——没有购买能力的购房行为和权益提取(equity withdrawals)通行无阻是缘于大家都认为再贷款永远无障碍，但这并非是普遍现象。在传统意义支持共和党的几个州里(red states)，规模较小的城镇无建房用地之虞，地段之间也没有大的溢价，因此较建房成本而言，房价从来不会太过离谱。
顶级城市的高档住房市场才是唯一真正意义的全球性市场。对此类住房的需求与金融业的财富息息相关。就在雷曼(Lehman)倒闭后几个月，伦敦和香港的豪宅遭遇了有史以来最大的季度降幅。
目前，曼哈顿的高档住宅市场恢复是最慢的；部分原因是美元对欧元升值后，来自海外的需求下降。但海外买家对于伦敦这类城市的房产以及法国南部的高端住宅依然趋之若鹜，价格1500万英镑以上的房屋，他们通常要买走一半。
在不久的将来，除去中国、以及与之关系紧密的亚洲、非洲以及南美洲等大宗商品（译者注：煤、油气等矿藏）丰富的国家的房地产市场之外，金融危机造成的经济困境将会阻碍房地产价格进一步上行。但是，大体说来，想要居有定所以及养家糊口的人往往生活在历史上奉行低利率和缺乏优质房屋供应的国家，这就支撑了当前的总体房屋价格水平。有些国家的房价可能会再次下跌，但是，只要全球经济沿着正确的方向发展，房价从目前水平大范围向下狂泻的概率似乎相当渺茫。
译者：常和
http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001034541
The restaurants tell the story. Walk around the affluent neighbourhoods of London, New York, Hong Kong or any of the prime residential markets of France and take a look at the restaurants. The best are nearly always full; the rest not always so.
Those in the fine dining joints of Manhattan, Chelsea and Central Hong Kong are feeling richer than they were two years ago, when the economic downturn hit all their investments, not least their homes. The subsequent bounce in financial markets has left them feeling better off. Not surprisingly, given the connection between financial markets and luxury homes, the values for properties above £1m have also improved.
The same story is told by the developers and owners of the prime residences across the world: the market is back, in some places pushing prices back to and even beyond their peak of 2007. And yet undercutting the words of even the most bullish of market participants seems to be a slight sense of unease. The market might be good again today – having seen prices bounce off the floor found at the end of 2008 – but tomorrow is not so certain.
In fact, in spite of a modest growth over the past year in almost all global housing markets, there are now worries that these markets could follow economies into the dreaded "double dip". After the shock of the financial crisis, most housing markets have at least stabilised, while some have bounced back strongly. But concerns that the situation remains fragile are growing. In the UK, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has reported that members are seeing more falls than rises, that a fall in buyers' enquiries is dragging prices lower, and predicts a fall of 5 per cent in 2010, and continuing declines in 2011. In the US, Alan Greenspan has expressed concern that the "small dip" in house prices, which he says most economists predict, would induce a major increase in foreclosures, which could feed on itself.
There are two broad schools of thought about the determinants of house prices. Jean-Michel Six, chief economist in Europe at Standard and Poor's, the rating agency, adopts a financial market perspective. In his view, we might not yet have witnessed a full correction of some of the imbalance that the 1997-2007 housing bubble created, such as decreasing affordability or surging price-to-rent ratios. The housing market is like other financial markets: price expectations create momentum that drives prices arising from normal affordability ratios. But they must eventually return to these norms through "mean reversion", creating the endemic booms and busts of cycles.
By contrast, Lucian Cook, director at Savills, the international estate agency, looks more to fundamentals of supply and demand for property itself. But he is also gloomy. He emphasises sluggish demand and he argues that "the slide looks more correlated with the economy, with sentiment turning just as things here look worse for people's wallets". He adds: "Price movements can lie but transaction numbers never do, and they are now much lower than last year's even though mortgage availability has improved."
Both the momentum school and the supply and demand school are right, of course. Movements of house prices are always the product of a mix of price expectations and underlying fundamentals. The housing market is influenced by two powerful, but distinct, forces: the desire for a safe and profitable investment and the need for a place to live. And these motives play different roles in different places at different times. There is no global housing market. Some factors are universal: the credit crunch hit consumer confidence and affected the availability of finance for house purchase everywhere. But the stimulus packages adopted around the world, and the measures adopted to keep people in their homes, have generally stabilised conditions. Several countries have targeted stimulus measures directly on home buyers, such as the US with its federal tax credit. But, looking forward, the experiences of different national housing markets in the next 10 years are likely to be as different as they were in the 10 that preceded the credit crunch.
Some countries – Spain, Ireland, Dubai – saw a housing bubble. In these countries a large part of market activity was accounted for by buyers who saw houses as attractive speculations rather than places to live. They expect to sell on the houses in a short time to someone else, or to realise cash by refinancing purchases on the back of ever rising house prices. With house builders anxious to get in on the act themselves a construction boom followed. In these markets, the bursting of the bubble has left a continuing oversupply of property and there can be no sustained revival until that backlog has been worked off. Every appearance of recovery will result in speculators and financiers unloading their holdings.
In some other countries that experienced large house price rises, such as the UK and France, both speculations and fundamentals played a part, but there was a better balance between the two. Most people who bought houses bought them in order to live in them, not to sell them. Rising prices were an intelligible response to much lower levels of both nominal and real – inflation-adjusted – interest rates. In these countries, prices also benefited from shortages of desirable property and land to build it on in many areas. Prices might have overshot a bit, as they do in all asset markets, but overshooting a new equilibrium is not the same as a bubble in which prices cease to bear any relation to fundamentals.
If metrics based on the ratio of house prices to earnings look historically high – and mostly they do – metrics based on average monthly outgoings, which are what determine affordability for most households, are still relatively favourable. In the UK, mortgage payments as a percentage of take-home pay have fallen below the historic average – a boon to those who can access the lower interest rates, though that tends to be those already on the housing ladder or able to muster large deposits.
Jon Hunt, the founder of Foxtons, who was seen to have called the top of the market accurately in 2007 with the sale of his London estate agency for more than £350m, says that this downturn was nothing like the crash of the early 1990s, when rocketing interest rates spelled agony for many homeowners. Having turned an investor in property, Hunt concludes: "The really hard collapse is over even if the market might not go anywhere for a while. We have been buying and continue buying where we see value. London is a really interesting residential place at the moment. There is a massively reduced supply."
Supply and demand for property as a place to live is all-important in markets such as Germany and Switzerland, where the investment motive has never been an important factor for private individuals. When there is no recent experience of rapid inflation or where land is plentiful a house is a residence, not a financial instrument. Younger people tend to rent property and owner-occupation represents a much lower population of the housing stock. Markets are likely to be as boring in the future as in the past.
The largest housing market of all – the US – is no more a single market than is the European market. Different areas of that country have seen very different mixes of speculative motive and economic fundamentals in the behaviour of their housing markets. In some areas of the country – such as Florida – off-plan purchasers who believed that prices were sure to rise bought in the expectation of flipping their properties at a profit. In others – such as the inner cities, where the subprime scandals were most extreme – unaffordable purchases or equity withdrawals were supported by the expectation that refinancing would always be possible, but this was never a universal picture. In smaller towns in red states, where there is no shortage of land to build and no large premiums for location, prices have never moved far from what it costs to build.
The market for prime property in the top cities is the only truly global market. Demand for these properties is closely tied to the fortunes of the financial sector and in the months immediately following the collapse of Lehman, luxury apartments in London and Hong Kong saw the biggest quarterly falls they have experienced.
The luxury market in Manhattan has been slowest to recover; partly because overseas demand has reduced because of the strength of the dollar against the euro. Real estate in cities such as London and in the prime markets of the South of France remains in demand from overseas buyers, who typically account for half of properties above £15m.
For the foreseeable future, there will be economic headwinds to much further house price growth, outside exceptional markets such as China and the associated commodity-rich countries of Asia, Africa and South America. Mostly, however, historically low interest rates and the basic undersupply of good quality homes in places where people want to live and raise families underpin the current general level of house prices. These might slip again in some countries but so long as the global economy heads in the right direction the prospects of a widespread house price crash from these levels look remote.
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