Patent ID: 8396812

Claim:
A computer-implemented method of generating a real estate property index, the method comprising: inputting into a data store of a computing apparatus real estate data comprising property data, price data and time of sale data representing historical real estate sales transactions in a predetermined real estate market, using said computer apparatus to manipulate said real estate data to group same into consecutive triple times based on said time of sale data, using said computer apparatus to generate a logarithmic transform function using said manipulated data with two time dummy variables corresponding to two consecutive time periods respectively bounded by the triple consecutive times, using said computer apparatus to extract the coefficients of the two time dummy variables of said logarithmic transform function for said two consecutive time periods, adding said two extracted coefficients in said computer apparatus to generate a transformed growth rate from the first to the last of said triple times, and generating said index from said transformed growth rate by calculating the anti-logarithm of said logarithmic transform function, wherein said logarithmic transform function has the form: log ⁢ ⁢ P i ⁡ ( t ) = α ⁡ ( t ) + ∑ j = 1 N ⁢ ⁢ β j ⁢ f j ⁡ ( X i , j ) + ∑ t = 1 T ⁢ ⁢ λ ⁡ ( t ) ⁢ D ⁡ ( t ) + ɛ i ⁡ ( t ) where: P i (t) is the selling price of property i at time t, α(t) is the intercept term, X is a vector of the N hedonic attributes included in the model, β j is the regression coefficient reflecting the implicit price of j th attribute, λ(t) estimates the cumulative growth rate to time t, D(t) is a set of dummy variables equal to 1 if the property sold in time-period t and zero otherwise, and ε i (t) is the random variation in price of property i at time t unaccounted for by the other terms.