Web-scraping housing prices in real-time: The Covid-19 crisis in the UK

While official statistics provide lagged and aggregate information on the housing market, extensive information is available publicly on real-estate websites. By web-scraping them for the UK on a daily basis, this paper extracts a large database from which we build timely and highly granular indicat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of housing economics 2023-03, Vol.59, p.101906, Article 101906
Main Authors: Bricongne, Jean-Charles, Meunier, Baptiste, Pouget, Sylvain
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Big data
High frequency
Housing
Humanities and Social Sciences
Quantitative Finance
Real time
United Kingdom
Web-scraping
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Summary:While official statistics provide lagged and aggregate information on the housing market, extensive information is available publicly on real-estate websites. By web-scraping them for the UK on a daily basis, this paper extracts a large database from which we build timely and highly granular indicators. One originality of the dataset is to focus on the supply side of the housing market, allowing to compute innovative indicators reflecting the sellers' perspective such as the number of new listings posted or how prices fluctuate over time for existing listings. Matching listing prices in our dataset with transacted prices from the notarial database, using machine learning, also measures the negotiation margin of buyers. During the Covid-19 crisis, these indicators demonstrate the freezing of the market and the “wait-and-see” behaviour of sellers. They also show that listing prices after the lockdown experienced a continued decline in London but increased in other regions.
ISSN:1051-1377
1096-0791
DOI:10.1016/j.jhe.2022.101906