Valuing homeownership

Housing tenure decision combines financial, economic and socio-psychological factors. This paper considers the global premium associated to homeownership. On the one hand, homeownership is associated to private benefits of being a landlord. On the other hand, overinvestment in housing is harmful to diversification and distorts portfolio management. This trade-off, similar to the one associated to corporate private benefits of control, is the cornerstone of our theoretical model. Furthermore, the empirical implementation of the model exhibits a homeownership premium for houses in the Brussels Region reaching at least 9% of the housing price. The findings are robust to several methodological refinements.