How to Better Measure Hedonic Residential Property Price Indexes

Hedonic regressions are used for property price index measurement to control for changes in the quality-mix of properties transacted. The paper consolidates the hedonic time dummy approach, characteristics approach, and imputation approaches. A practical hedonic methodology is proposed that (i) is weighted at a basic level; (ii) has a new (quasi-) superlative form and thus mitigates substitution bias; (iii) is suitable for sparse data in thin markets; and (iv) only requires the periodic estimation of hedonic regressions for reference periods and is not subject to the vagrancies of misspecification and estimation issues.