Reporting on property prices

Chris Lloyd, posting at Core Economics, has a post on the reporting of property prices. The most reliable data on property prices is provided by the RP Data-Rismark Property Indicies, which account for the compositional problems discussed below.

There is something about the way real estate trends are reported that borders on the irresponsible....

.... The common thread in all these headlines is they use a measure of middle sale price (usually the median). The headline figures actually differ significantly depending on the data source (REIV or APM) and are possibly dodgy. But regardless of which figure you take, it occurs to me, and I am sure I am not the first to make this observation, that there is a potentially huge transaction bias in these figures....

We are told that the first home buyer’s market is booming. So there are many more sales in the lower price range. So the median or mean sale price would go down, even in a flat market.....