Commercial Real Estate Rent Index

forthcoming

This project aims to develop rent price indices for commercial real estate (CRERI) in Austria. Due to existing data gaps, Statistics Austria was not able to calculate CRE rent indices in the past. The work package covered in this project falls into the scope of call objective D “Preparing for the compilation and provision of the Commercial Real Estate Price Index and/or the Commercial Real Estate Rent indices in line with EU requirements”. Given the need for reliable data on the commercial real estate market and the ambitious Commission legal proposal for regulation, Statistics Austria needs to focus on analysing and developing CRERI data sources. Given a lack of administrative data, we aim to test the suitability of the SPPI survey for CRERI purposes. Furthermore, Statistics Austria collects data from multiple real estate websites and aims to compare indices from web scraping with the results from the producer price index for services’ (SPPI) survey. The project may additionally provide insight into the quality of offer prices from web portals versus information directly collected from companies in NACE L68. The main objective is to derive meaningful and representative rent indicators that will fulfil the requirements of upcoming CREI regulation. We will monitor the development and discussion surrounding the legal texts and adjust our aims accordingly. By testing two data sources, the existing SPPI survey and webscraping, we also learn about their respective strengths and weaknesses. In addition to quality, we will also assess the resource requirements of both data sources, to be able to put the most economical method in production. In case neither method will be satisfying, we will provide an assessment of the shortcomings, and we will provide a strategy to move forward, which would likely be a first outline of a required dedicated survey describing its design, structure, data requirements and challenges.