distributional aspects of the housing market within a given economy. These distributional price data are very relevant for additional analysis as they can, for instance, be paired with household-level income data for affordability assessments. Finally, an overview of the entire housing market can reveal supply-demand mismatches particularly regarding in which price segment formal housing market activity is generally low or absent altogether.

We start the web scraping process by identifying the most up-to-date and complete websites that list private property prices for sale in the five EMDEs. We identify up to three relevant listing websites per economy. Websites were selected based on the following aspects: (i) websites with the most comprehensive number of up-to-date listings, (ii) websites that offer broad ranges of properties and do not only cater to the luxurious segment (i.e., avoiding websites exclusively targeting expats etc.); (iii) websites that offer structured data entries on housing attributes including price and size. We limit ourselves to up to three websites since we notice considerable cross-postings in additional, usually less comprehensive, websites. We then scrape all residential properties that are listed at one point in time for sale on these websites along with all available housing features, including price, size, type (i.e., whether the property is an apartment or a house), location, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, and sometimes amenities such as garage, time of construction, number of floors, etc.

We extracted online listing data for the entire formal housing market of five EMDEs at one point in time, between April 2020 and August 2020. While this falls within the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, insights on how house prices were impacted in EMDEs are qualitative and largely anecdotal. Commentary on the matter focuses on the affordability challenges for HHs rather than specifically on changes in property prices.<sup>11</sup> Beyond qualitative insights, comprehensive analyses on price changes due to the COVID-19 crisis are preliminary and focused mostly on developed economies (e.g., Pfeifer & Steurer 2020 for Vienna and London; or Bricongne et al. 2021 for the UK). While the results are not transferrable to EMDEs, they still offer some context into a largely under-researched area. On the impact of COVID-19 on housing markets in the UK, Bricongne et al. (2021) show that while the number of offers per week dropped during the first lockdown period, house prices did not change significantly (maximum of 2.6 percent increase) (Bricongne et al. 2021). Pfeifer & Steurer (2020) make a similar observation for the housing market in London, while showing that the housing market in Vienna follows an upward trend following the COVID-19 crisis. Despite the timing overlap, we cannot draw on existing literature to determine if bias may exist in our data, or, more importantly, the direction of the bias.

As a first effort to scrape private property prices in several EMDEs, we faced unique challenges compared to similar efforts in developed markets, such as issues pertaining to the number of observations available per website, the organization and reliability of data, measurement units provided, and the overall reliability of the websites. In many EMDEs, property listing websites are often not the primary source for transactions. Often, buyers and sellers revert to real estate agents and personal interactions. Yet, online platforms are becoming increasingly more popular for transacting goods and services, including properties. In Africa, for

> 11 Some regional analyses in Latin America qualitatively point to the fact that while there was economic slowdown and increased investor uncertainty dampening growth in the short term, but also that the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted consumer preferences to larger properties with more outdoor space. Another analysis for India, for instance, reported that house prices have stagnated in 2020 / 2021, a trend attributed, among others, to the receding demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic (Reuters 2021).

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