Feeling nervous about rocketing home price appreciation rates in dozens of markets around the country? Are you worried -- just a little -- that your home equity holdings might begin to decline if mortgage interest rates heat up?

Well then get ready to hedge your home equity with a new breed of financial instruments expected to be unveiled within the next few months. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission currently is reviewing an "S-1" filing by a high-powered housing market analytics firm called Macro Securities Research LLC. The securities registration outlines the operation of a new market of home equity hedge vehicles indexed to home price movements.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange confirms that it is also working with Macro Securities on a new futures contract trading instrument tied to home price indexes. Macro is the brainchild of two founders of Case Shiller Weiss of Cambridge, Mass., the firm that developed the home price index technology used by the federal government, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and top mortgage lenders to gauge resale home values. Case Shiller Weiss, now owned by financial markets giant, Fiserv, Inc., also developed the "CASA" automated valuation model that is widely used by lenders to evaluate properties online, rather than undertaking costlier traditional appraisals.

Yale economics professor Robert Shiller and longtime associate Allan Weiss have teamed up with Wall Street hedge fund and derivatives veteran Samuel R. Masucci, III to design the new "MACRO" investment vehicle for individuals and institutions. It is expected to be offered to individual homeowners in 2005 by stock brokers and other securities dealers, assuming it gets the go-ahead from the SEC.

Here's how it might work: Say you own a home in the Los Angeles area that has benefited stunningly from the past three years of housing price hyperinflation. With retirement just over the horizon, you are worried that the LA market might correct itself -- as it did dramatically in the early 1990s -- pushing your home equity holdings lower than they are today.

Under the Macro Securities plan, you'd be able to buy a "Down-MACRO" -- a hedging device that essentially is a "short" position on Los Angeles housing prices. Your Down-MACRO on LA would be matched with an "Up-MACRO" -- probably purchased by a large institutional investor that is hedging its own portfolio with a "long" position on LA housing prices.

The MACRO certificates are expected to be traded on the American Stock Exchange, according to the SEC filing. If your "short" position or bet on prices proves to be correct, you would be compensated for your paper home equity loss by funds paid by the purchaser of the "Up-MACRO." If your bet is incorrect and LA prices continued to rise, the funds you invested to purchase the Down-MACRO would pay off the investor who bought the Up-MACRO. Of course, on paper you should be fine -- after all, you didn't lose the home equity you thought you might.

Details on pricing and structuring of the MACROs won't be publicly available until the securities are offered to the public, probably sometime in the first half of 2005, according to Masucci. The existence of housing price-indexed hedge vehicles in the form of MACROs is likely to stimulate a variety of innovations in the mortgage and housing fields, he said in an interview. Already under development are home equity insurance coverage plans that would be offered by insurance companies to their homeowner clients, and would be pegged to MACRO securities. Masucci said home mortgage lenders also have expressed interest in using MACROs to hedge against collateral risk -- declining property values. With housing price risk hedged, according to Masucci, lenders could offer discounted mortgage rates, and might not need to charge for private mortgage insurance on low-downpayment loans.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange housing price-indexed futures contracts program, when operational, is expected to allow investors to trade contracts tied to homes -- the nation's largest asset class -- just as they trade futures tied to interest rates, stock prices and other indexed assets.

(Look for further updates on home equity hedges and futures in Realty Times in 2005.)

Published: December 20, 2004

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Kenneth R. Harney writes an award-winning, nationally-syndicated column on housing and real estate from Washington, D.C. He is also managing director of the National Real Estate Development Center, a professional education company. He is a past member of the Federal Reserve Board's Consumer Advisory Council, a committee that by federal statute reviews all Fed actions on home mortgage, consumer credit and banking industry regulation. He served as a member of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Working Group on Computerized Loan Origination (CLO) systems, and is a member of the Editorial Board of the Fannie Mae Foundation's journal, Housing Policy Debate. He is the author of two books on mortgage finance and real estate.