Economic sustainability considerations in a local housing market with post-bubble hindsight

Given the pivotal role of the housing bubble in the subsequent credit crunch, the following question may be raised: could the global financial crisis have been moderated if prude property valuations had been made at the time of issuing bank loans, and if governments and institutions had been concerned about raising the quality of market information? Indeed ‘we still lack the good knowledge even about how to measure house prices and what would be the best methods to map the markets’ (as stated in the Call for papers for this event). As a corollary, are automatic valuation methods/models (AVMs) useful in handling mortgage lending problems? This paper addresses the abovementioned issues in two ways: on one hand, it presents an empirical modelling application for mortgage valuation; on the other hand, it examines more qualitative, rhetorical arguments for the use of AVMs in this field. After an overview of the problems involved the paper proposes a novel framework based on the concept of economic sustainability that is argued to connect with the financial crisis, credit crunch and housing bubble discourse – it is to note that, traditionally, housing market modelling and sustainable development paradigms are treated as incompatible. Defining a sustainable housing market depends on long-term processes and often partial criteria. The empirical part of the paper concerns the development of house prices in relation to incomes in Trondheim, Norway, in the period 1993-2007