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

Article dans une revue: 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.

Auteur(s)

Jean-Charles Bricongne, Baptiste Meunier, Sylvain Pouget

Revue
  • Journal of Housing Economics
Collection
  • COVID-19’s Impacts on Housing Markets
Date de publication
  • 2023
Mots-clés JEL
E01 R30
Mots-clés
  • Housing
  • Real time
  • Big data
  • Web-scraping
  • High frequency
  • United Kingdom
Pages
  • 101906
Version
  • 1
Volume
  • 59