Developing timeliness and frequency of HPI

ongoing

The aim of the project is to respond to the user needs for more up-to-date and more frequent House Price Indices. Eurostat is setting up a Task Force to study the flash estimates for HPI and, in addition, the research work of OOH is focused on both increasing the frequency and shortening the delay in order to include owner-occupied housing in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices at some point in time. If the results of this project are good, the relevance of House Price Indices will be improved and the possibilities of including owner-occupied housing to HICP will be increased. The project consists of three parts: first work package will focus on managing the project, second work package is dedicated to investigating the flash estimate of HPI and third work package will be working towards more frequent HPI. The research for HPI flash estimate will be carried out mainly with the data sources and methodologies already available, and possibly by experimenting new methodologies. The price index for existing houses will be calculated as quickly as possible after the end of quarter, enabling the comparison of results to the currently published index, in which the data is given more time to accumulate. This comparison allows to investigate the revisions when using less complete data. In addition, in order to strive for more up-to-date indices, an experimental asking price index will be calculated and compared to current transaction-based indices. We will take part in the new Task Force organized by Eurostat, which is working to promote more timely and more frequent HPI. The improvement of the frequency of the Housing Price Index is limited to existing dwellings, as the trade volumes in new dwellings are very small and the market situation has been particularly difficult in recent years, which is why it does not seem realistic at this stage to produce a monthly index for new dwellings. The price index of existing dwellings in housing companies is already monthly index.