Early Real Estate Indicators during the COVID-19 Crisis

In this article we construct a number of early housing-market indicators from daily-scraped list-price data and investigate how they inform on housing-market trends prior to the release of official transaction data. We minimize the impact of non-market conform list prices by our data selection- and cleaning routine and thereby improve the overlap between list and transaction data. In addition to some well-known real-estate indicators (price and rent indices, price-rent ratios, market volume, time-on-market, and market turnover) we develop a new market sentiment indicator which we construct from the direction and frequency of online price changes for individual listings. We then use this group of indicators to investigate how housing markets in London and Vienna react to the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020. For London these indicators show high volatility during much of 2020 and we find that the sales and rental markets drift apart: The sales market shows an overall positive price trend, while the rental market becomes significantly weaker after the onset of the COVID-19 crisis. For Vienna we find that all indicators signal positive market developments for the first eight months after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.