House Price Measurement in New Zealand is a stocktake of the different house price measures available in New Zealand. We summarise them on a number of dimensions – quality adjustment, timing of data, weighting scheme, coverage – and look at how the measures compare over the short and long term.
The good news is that, despite challenges and limitations on how we can measure house prices, the long-run trends of house prices tend to be very similar. This observation was also the case in a recent study of the seven available UK measures (Wood, 2005), and implies that there are no systematic biases creeping into our measurements. It is the shorter-term measurements (which of course are the ones that are the most influential on a day to day, media basis) that can vary across different methods.
Around the world, there is increased focus on the measurement of house prices, and Eurostat is currently starting to compile a best practices manual for this.
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Citation
Statistics New Zealand (2010). House price measurement in New Zealand.
Wellington: Statistics New Zealand
Published in January 2010 by
Statistics New Zealand
Tatauranga Aotearoa
Wellington, New Zealand
ISBN 978-0-478-35332-7 (online)