Real estate is an unusual item in the economy. It is one of the few products that are usually bought used rather than newly manufactured, so manufacturing statistics do not adequately capture it, and the land that is part of many real estate transactions is typically not manufactured at all. Housing is often one of the largest pieces of a household’s budget, especially for lower-income households, so questions about housing affordability are important politically and socially as well as economically. And, as was demonstrated during the recent financial crisis, economic problems beginning in the housing industry have an effect on the entire economy. The resources in this chapter can help users examine all economic aspects of residential real estate, including trends in home prices, housing affordability, housing quality, and the mortgage market.
Major Sources: United States
Census Bureau (U.S. Department of Commerce)
The American Housing Survey, managed by the U.S. Census Bureau, is the major source for data about renters, homeowners, and the structures they occupy in the United States. The data covers all aspects of housing, including detailed information about mortgages (amount, interest rate, term, etc.), reasons people gave for moving into their present neighborhood and their present home, problems with their home (e.g., “sagging roof” or “inadequate insulation”) or with their neighborhood (e.g., “noise” or “litter”), and even whether the home’s smoke detectors are battery-powered or AC. Aggregate data from the American Housing Survey is available through American FactFinder (see chapter 2), but microdata from the survey can be downloaded from the website of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD, www.huduser.org/portal/datasets/ahs.html). HUD also distributes other housing-related data sets, including data on housing affordability; fair market rents; persons and Census tracts eligible for certain types of HUD assistance; building permits at the state, county, and, in some urban areas, even the town or township level; and number of vacant addresses at the Census tract level.
Major Sources: World
Bank for International Settlements
The Bank for International Settlements (BIS, see chapter 14) disseminates data about real estate prices for more than forty countries, plus Hong Kong and the Euro area (www.bis.org/statistics/pp.htm). The data covers most European and North American countries, several countries in east and southeast Asia, plus Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Turkey, and South Africa. Not all of the data sets are strictly comparable: much of the data is indexed (expressed as changes in the price relative to the price on a given date, rather than as actual prices), but the base year varies; some data is seasonally adjusted and some is not; some covers entire countries, some covers only capital cities or urban areas; and the exact type of real estate covered varies from apartments to single-family houses to land. Check the metadata carefully to understand exactly what is covered by the data for any given country.
Eurostat (European Union)
For the European Union, a similar index is available from Eurostat as part of its harmonized indices of consumer prices series (http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/; search for “HICP—housing” in the Statistical Database). Monthly and annual data on changes in rental prices is also available as part of HICP; search for “harmonised index of consumer prices” in the Statistical Database, click on the “data explorer” icon next to the desired data set (monthly or annual data, index or rate of change), then click on the plus icon next to “All items HICP” and search for “actual rentals for housing.” Unlike the BIS data, this data is harmonized and safely comparable across countries, though the BIS may have a longer time series for some European countries. Eurostat makes recent data available only for the housing price index, and data only from 1996 to present for changes in rents. BIS data, on the other hand, is available as far back as 1819 (no, that’s not a typo!) for Norway and 1955 for Japan.
Minor Sources
Freddie Mac Federal Housing Finance Agency
Several U.S. data sources are primarily concerned with the cost of purchasing a home. These include Freddie Mac (also known as the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation), a “government-sponsored enterprise” (GSE) that buys mortgage loans from banks and other lenders. Freddie Mac manages the Primary Mortgage Market Survey (www.freddiemac.com/pmms/), a weekly survey that has been gathering information about mortgage rates since 1971. The entire data set—more than forty years of time-series data—is available on Freddie Mac’s website, as is the entire data set converted into a monthly rather than weekly format. Freddie Mac’s regulator, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), maintains House Price Indices for the United States as a whole, for individual states, and for individual metropolitan statistical areas (www.fhfa.gov, “House Price Index” tab). Some of this data is contained in FRED (see chapter 8), but some of the more detailed data, such as house price indices for individual mid-sized metropolitan areas, is available only on the FHFA site.
S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices
Standard & Poors maintains a set of home price indices, the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (http://us.spindices.com/index-family/real-estate/sp-case-shiller). This index was originally developed by economists Karl Case and Robert Shiller. Although a composite index for the entire United States is available, the S&P/Case-Shiller indices primarily focus on conditions in twenty large cities, including New York, Miami, Chicago, Denver, and Los Angeles. Data for some cities is available as far back as 1987. As with the FHFA House Price Index, some of the data sets are in FRED, others, such as the condominium price index, are available only on the S&P site.
National Association of Realtors
Another source of data on home sales in the United States is the National Association of Realtors (NAR, www.realtor.org/research-and-statistics), a trade association for people who work in the real estate industry. In both PDF reports and downloadable Excel spreadsheets, the NAR provides data on sales of existing (not newly constructed) homes, affordability of buying a home, and state of the commercial real estate market, as well as statistics on many other topics related to buying and selling houses. Much of the data is freely available, but some research reports are available only for a fee.
Land Registry Lloyd’s Banking Group
In the United Kingdom, two sources—one private and one governmental—provide geographically detailed data on house prices and house sales. The government source, the Land Registry, publishes data on number of sales per month, average sale price, monthly and annual rate of change in the price, and an overall House Price Index. This data is available as precise as the borough level for the greater London area and at the county level for the rest of England and Wales, 1995 to present. The data is available both as easily searchable, graphically presented statistics (www.landregistry.gov.uk/public/house-prices-and-sales) and as raw data that can be downloaded for further analysis (www.landregistry.gov.uk/market-trend-data/public-data).
Lloyds Banking Group (www.lloydsbankinggroup.com), a private company, publishes its own index, the Halifax House Price Index. This index covers a longer time period than the Land Registry—1983 to present—but offers less geographic detail, with data broken down only by the major geographic regions of the United Kingdom. The Halifax House Price Index does, however, include some data not available from the Land Registry: it has data for Scotland and Northern Ireland and also offers data that separates first-time home buyers from those who are not.
Quotable Value Ltd.
Some detailed home price data is available for New Zealand from Quotable Value Ltd. (QV, www.qv.co.nz/property-info/property-reports/). It provides both a monthly Residential Price Index and a Quarterly House Price Index at the local council level, as well as quarterly data by local council about the number of houses, apartments, and empty lots (“sections”) sold and the average price, both overall and for each type of property. Semiannual data is also available for commercial properties and for various types of farmland. Only current data—not time-series data—is provided for some variables.