Alternative Approaches to Measuring House Price Inflation

The paper uses data on sales of detached houses in a small Dutch town over 14 quarters starting at the first quarter of 2005 in order to compare various methods for constructing a house price index over this period. Four classes of methods are considered: (i) stratification techniques plus normal index number theory; (ii) time dummy hedonic regression models; (iii) hedonic imputation techniques and (iv) additive in land and structures hedonic regression models. The last approach is used in order to decompose the price of a house into land and structure components and it relies on the imposition of some monotonicity constraints or exogenous information on price movements for structures. The problems associated with constructing an index for the stock of houses using information on the sales of houses are also considered.