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What do online listings tell us about the housing market?

Michele Loberto, Andrea Luciani, Marco Pangallo

arXiv 6 Apr 2020 · Econometrics · 74 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2004.02706 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Traditional data sources for the analysis of housing markets show several limitations, that recently started to be overcome using data coming from housing sales advertisements (ads) websites. In this paper, using a large dataset of ads in Italy, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of the problems and potential of these data. The main problem is that multiple ads ("duplicates") can correspond to the same housing unit. We show that this issue is mainly caused by sellers' attempt to increase visibility of their listings. Duplicates lead to misrepresentation of the volume and composition of housing supply, but this bias can be corrected by identifying duplicates with machine learning tools. We then focus on the potential of these data. We show that the timeliness, granularity, and online nature of these data allow monitoring of housing demand, supply and liquidity, and that the (asking) prices posted on the website can be more informative than transaction prices.

Citation extraction

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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 71% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Elliot Anenberg \ Steven Laufer (2017) A More Timely House Price Index1.00053100%
2Monika Piazzesi, Martin Schneider \ Johannes Stroebel (2020) Segmented Housing Search0.81142100%
3Dorinth W. van Dijk \ Marc K. Francke (2017) Internet Search Behavior, Liquidity and Prices in the Housing Market0.81142100%
4Marco Pangallo \ Michele Loberto (2018) Home is where the ad is: online interest proxies housing demand self0.7373367%
5Antonio Merlo \ Francois Ortalo-Magne (2004) Bargaining over residential real estate: evidence from England0.73732100%
6L. Rachel Ngai \ Kevin D. Sheedy (2020) The Decision to Move House and Aggregate Housing-Market Dynamics0.73732100%
7Paul E. Carrillo, Eric R. de Wit \ William Larson (2015) Can Tightness in the Housing Market Help Predict Subsequent Home Price Appreciation? Evidence from the United States and the Net…0.64422100%
8Edward Glaeser \ Joseph Gyourko (2018) The Economic Implications of Housing Supply0.64422100%
9Lynn Wu \ Erik Brynjolfsson (2015) The Future of Prediction: How Google Searches Foreshadow Housing Prices and Sales0.64422100%
10Michele Loberto, Andrea Luciani \ Marco Pangallo (2018) The potential of big housing data: an application to the Italian real-estate market self0.5853333%

Showing the top 10 of 23 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1On learning agent-based models from data0.64422