Evolution of Housing Prices in Chile

The availability of real estate data is clearly limited in Chile, which makes more complex the discussion of the possible vulnerabilities of households and the financial sector to risks arising from real estate markets. This paper proposes a set of housing price indicators for measuring the potential pressures that could be developing in the credit market. Using these price measures, we find that the recent sustained rise in home prices coincides with the sustained increase in disposable income and the decreasing trend of long-term interest rates, factors that have strongly driven the expansion of mortgage loans.