Is us homeownership bottoming out?

Homeownership has been on the decline in both the US and the UK in recent years, as rising property prices and a lack of supply in the wake of the global financial crisis have left a generation of would-be homeowners unable to get onto the property ladder.

In the US, the rate of homeownership is near a 30-year low, according to new figures from the Commerce Department this week. The rate of homeownership edged up slightly from 63.4 per cent in the second quarter of the year to 63.7 per cent in the third quarter - a rise that has now prompted some economists to speculate that the trend could be bottoming out.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, tells the Wall Street Journal that the numbers could finally be levelling out: "I don’t expect any significant increase any time soon, but I think we’re finally at bottom."

Even if stabilising, though, the situation is far from changing dramatically: the number of renter households in the country rose 1.3 million year-on-year in Q3 2015, far faster than the 123,000 increase in the number of new homeowner households.