insights on the distribution of property prices.<sup>5</sup> Despite these shortcomings, this database currently offers the most comprehensive data series on house prices.

Second, the International Comparison Program (ICP 2011), which collects prices for a range of goods and services that make up final consumption expenditure and gross capital formation, also captures housing expenditures. The ICP survey collects annual rental prices and dwelling stock data. Rents are either captured as actual or imputed rents (World Bank 2020). In the most recent ICP cycle (2017), participating economies collected rental data for 21 different dwelling types, ranging from one-bedroom apartments to single-family homes.

Third, a more regional-focused data source on property prices is provided by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which publishes nominal residential property price indices for OECD countries, as well as price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios.<sup>6</sup> The database particularly focuses on house price developments across regions and cities within countries to capture spatial price variation. For select countries, OECD also offers the number and value of housing transactions. While insightful for advanced economies, this database does not cover any emerging economies and mostly publishes indexed data to track price changes over time.

Fourth, institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the United States Federal Reserve Bank collate property price data from various national sources. IMF’s Global Housing Watch platform, for instance, tracks developments in housing markets across the world on a quarterly basis.<sup>7</sup> The database collates property price data from different sources (e.g., BIS, European Central Bank, Federal Reserve, and national source) for 63 countries – mostly advanced economies – to assess valuation in housing markets. Further, it provides metrics such as price-to-rent and price-to-income ratios. Similarly, the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank’s International House Price Database publishes quarterly house prices for 25 mostly developed economies by drawing on national public sources primarily from central banks, statistical offices, or other non-government organizations (Mack & Martínez-García 2011).<sup>8</sup> The data collected by these institutions are mostly for developed economies, and these institutions collate secondary data from a plethora of different sources, and primarily make data available in an indexed format.

Fifth, in collecting and analyzing actual house prices _across_ emerging economies, the Center for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (CAHF) is unique in its efforts. It systematically collects house prices for African countries by surveying local housing experts on the cost and size of the _cheapest_ house built by a private developer. Figures are published in CAHF’s annual housing finance yearbook, covering the last decade. CAHF’s approach also turns the conversation on house prices away from mean or aggregate measures and to the lower tail of the formal market. From the perspective of policy dialog on affordable housing, this approach may be more appropriate. However, the usability of the data for policy purposes suffers partly because i) the price point provided represents only the extremely lower end of the formally developed new housing units and ii) is not paired with information regarding the quantity supplied at or near this price range.

> 5 <u>https://www.bis.org/statistics/pp_detailed.htm</u>

> 6 - <u>https://data.oecd.org/price/housing prices.htm</u>

> 7 <u>https://www.imf.org/external/research/housing/index.htm</u>

> 8 <u>https://www.dallasfed.org/institute/houseprice</u>

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