Linking Housing and Capital Markets in the Former Soviet Bloc: The Status of Residential Mortgage Bond and Secondary Markets in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation ("Russia") and former soviet satellite countries and republics of Central and Eastern Europe ("Soviet Bloc") have struggled with privatizing housing and establishing market-based residential mortgage systems. This thesis addresses the recent efforts of three former Soviet Bloc countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) to fund residential mortgage lending through the use of mortgage bonds and capital markets (wholesale lending). This European lending market is different and, in many ways, a competitor to residential mortgage securitization, an American method of accessing capital markets. For comparison, this thesis addresses efforts to connect Russia's residential mortgage markets to domestic and international capital markets. The thesis concludes that the residential mortgage markets in these four countries remain in the early stages of development and that the current benefits of mortgage bond and mortgage-backed securities in such stages remain unclear. Thesis Supervisor: Henry 0. Pollakowski, Ph.D. Visiting Scholar, MIT Center for Real Estate Title: