Rising property prices also attract speculators hoping to make a fast return. As speculators enter the market in increasing numbers, the probability of a bubble, and then a crash, also increases. The increased securitisation of mortgage debt created the means by which developers and speculators could build new properties, and sell them to high-risk, sub-prime, borrowers. The high-risk mortgage debt could be repackaged, and sold off to largely unwitting banks. This created an extreme form of moral hazard, which meant that many lenders blindly pursued short-term profits in the belief that their potential losses from loan defaults were fully covered.
The long-term housing shortage and upward trend in house prices, also provided encouragement for first-time buyers to enter the market, and for investors and speculators to provide funds for home construction, and for lending to potential borrowers. This all works well when house prices do, indeed, rise, but when the bubble bursts the effect can be catastrophic, spreading shock waves across the national economy, and into other countries. The globalised nature of financial markets accelerated the speed of the financial crisis that followed the housing crash.