Data Sources

In practice, because of the high cost of undertaking purpose-designed surveys of house prices, the methods adopted by statistical agencies and others to construct residential property price indices have mainly made use of administrative data, the latter usually being a function of the house price data sets generated by a country’s legal and administrative processes associated with buying a house. The indices so constructed can vary according to the point in the house purchasing process at which the price is measured. For example, the final transaction price or the earlier valuation used for securing a loan could be used as the “price” of the property. Furthermore, different administrative data sets will generally collect information on different sets of characteristics associated with the sales of the properties. These differing information sets will generally affect index compilation methods, often acting as a constraint on the techniques available to quality adjust for houses of different sizes, locations, etc. Thus data sets have historically acted as a constraint on index construction.