Hedonic Price Indexes for Housing

Every house is different. It is important that house price indexes take account of these quality differences. Hedonic methods which express house prices as a function of a vector of characteristics (such as number of bedrooms and bathrooms, land area and location) are particularly useful for this purpose. In this report I consider some of the developments in the hedonic methodology, as it is applied in a housing context, that have occurred in the last three decades. A number of hedonic house price indexes are now available. However, it is often difficult to see how these indexes relate to each other. For this reason the paper attempts to impose some structure on the literature by developing a taxonomy of hedonic methods, and then show how existing methods fit into this taxonomy. Also discussed are some promising areas for future research in the hedonic field, particularly the use of geospatial data and nonparametric methods for better capturing the impact of location on house prices. The main criticisms of the hedonic approach are evaluated and compared with the repeat sales and stratified median methods. The overall conclusion is that the advantages of the hedonic approach outweigh its disadvantages.