The result of these developments is that for a given share of GDP devoted to housing investment, there is a smaller increase in the number of dwellings than was the case previously. In a sense, as a society there has been a trade-off between quality and quantity; in particular, we have implicitly chosen to build bigger and betterappointed dwellings, rather than more dwellings.
The flip side of the constant risk reallocation is a certain reduction in transparency. More and more often, risks end up in portfolios where you wouldn’t expect them in the first place. Tracking the flow and the location of risks has become trickier for market participants as well as for supervisory authorities.