The Housing in Bottom of Pyramid Markets

Housing is one of the larger BOP markets—larger than transportation, smaller than energy. The market encompasses major spending items—rent, mortgage payments (or imputed rents), and repairs and other services. But the BOP housing market is perhaps uniquely handicapped by informality. Both lack of legal title to housing in squatter settlements—Hernando De Soto’s “dead capital”—and lack of access to mortgage financing for the BOP limit its potential size. Despite these barriers, both private sector approaches and policy reforms—sometimes catalyzed by NGOs—are showing how to tap this market in ways that provide significant benefits for BOP households. In Asia especially, where mortgage markets are undeveloped and land prices high relative to income, the market potential—and the need—is huge (Bestani and Klein 2006). The measured BOP market for housing in Africa (12 countries), Asia (9), Eastern Europe, and Latin America and the Caribbean is $187.5 billion. This represents recorded annual household spending on housing in the 36 low- and middle-income countries for which standardized data exist, covering 2.1 billion of the world’s BOP population. The total BOP housing market in these four regions, including 3.96 billion people in all surveyed countries, is estimated to be $331.8 billion (see box 1.5 in chapter 1 for the estimation method). Because imputed rent is a major part of household spending on housing and cannot be determined precisely, these numbers should be regarded as setting a lower bound for such spending. Asia has the largest measured regional BOP market for housing, $86.6 billion, reflecting a significant BOP population of 1.49 billion. The total BOP housing market in Asia (including the Middle East) is estimated to be $171.4 billion, representing the spending of 2.9 billion people. Latin America has the next largest measured mar[1]ket, $47.4 billion (276 million people), and an estimated total market of $56.7 billion (360 million people).