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Abstract

The demographic, economic and social changes that have characterized the last decades, and the dramatic financial crisis that has taken place since 2008, have led to a demand for structural changes in the pension sector and a growing interest in individual pension products. Hence the need, for most elderly people, to liquidate their fixed assets, which are usually the homes in which they live. This highlights products such as reverse mortgages and domestic reversibility plans. Within this context, we propose a contractual scheme where an immediate life annuity is obtained by paying a single-premium in the form of real estate rights (RERs), for example by transferring to an insurer the property title of a house or a similar realty, while keeping its usufruct or a restricted bundle of rights. The level of the installments depends on the fair value of the transferred RER at the contract’s issue, the life expectancy of the insured and the expected growth rate of the real estate market value. The contract design is developed by considering the control of the financial risk inherent in the contract itself, because of the prospective changes in the value of the RERs, and the level of the insurer’s leverage. Finally, we provide some numerical evidence of the proposed contractual structure, in order to compare the level of the installments according to the house return forecasts in different European countries.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Annals of Operations Research. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-019-03241-y
Publisher Keywords:	Reverse mortgage; home reversion plan; real estate; personal pension product
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Actuarial Science & Insurance
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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