Real Estate Price Indices and Price Dynamics: An Overview from an Investments Perspective

This article reviews the state of the art in real estate price indexing and the state of knowledge about real estate price dynamics, with a focus on investment property, or income-generating commercial property. Investment properties form a large component of the national wealth and of capital markets and represent a major investment asset class. They are characterized by various types of heterogeneity, including among assets, markets, and data sources, making the study of real estate pricing uniquely challenging. Yet in recent decades, urban economists and econometricians have pioneered major new price indexing methodologies that, combined with new types of data sources, are shedding light on the nature of commercial property price dynamics, revealing both important commonalities and unique differences compared with equities and fixed-income securities pricing.