Tracking Home-Owners’ Sentiments: Subjective Indices and Convergent Validity

Surveys regularly ask home-owners to guess what their property might be worth in the current housing market. We develop suitable statistical techniques to construct hedonic and repeat-sales style house price indices from these owner-estimated values (OEVs). The resulting series are then linked to a large set of quality-adjusted residential property price indices estimated from transaction data allowing us to perform a variety of convergent validity tests. Based on results for 20 countries, several decades and different OEV elicitation techniques, we conclude that the “wisdom of the home-owner crowd” is sufficient to study objective house price dynamics. Yet, surveys fail to accurately measure house price levels.