House Price Index Based on Online Listing Information: The Case of China

Abstract While a timely, accurate house price index with broad coverage is of significant importance in housing market research and analysis, the lack of reliable raw data sources remains a major constraint in the house price index construction in nascent housing markets such as China. In this study, we introduce online listing information as an innovative data source for house price index construction, using China's housing resale markets as an example. Compared with alternative data sources, such as the officially-registered transaction information of housing resales, our analysis shows that online listing data provide a better trade-off between accuracy, reliability, and feasibility, especially after the resolution of potential replicated and/or manipulated data issues using our proposed procedures. Based on the cleaned online listing information, we calculate the first housing resale price indices covering almost all (274) Chinese cities. In particular, for around 200 relatively smaller cities, the index provides the first regular house price indicator, which shows a significant divergence in house price dynamics between different tiers of cities. We also briefly discuss the potential extensions of the listing price index, including the daily house price index and the housing rental price index.