Statistics Belgium

(A division of the Federal Public Service Economy, SMEs, Self-employed and Energy)

Economic Statistics - Price Statistics Unit

Directorate General Statistics - Statistics Belgium

North Gate - Boulevard du Roi Albert II, 16 - 1000 Brussels

The House price index is a quarterly index covering purchases of new dwellings and existing dwellings.

Indexes, weights and growth rates are available according to the specification of the Commission implementing regulation (EU) No 2023/470 (global HPI, purchases of new dwellings, purchase of existing dwellings).

HPI indices cover all residential properties purchased by households in the reference period. 

For the primary (since 2013) and secondary market related indexes, the database of the Land Registry is used. This covers all the transactions of properties across the whole territory. Full transaction prices including the value of land are used.

Weights for purchase of new dwellings are estimated on basis of national accounts (following ESA 2010 standards) data. Data of the land registry is used to obtain a weight for the purchase of existing dwellings (total value of the dwellings transacted on the secondary market are calculated for each type of property).

The HPI is a chain-linked Laspeyres index. The current reference year is 2015.

Private households.

The target population is the set of all transactions of dwellings purchased by households. 

The whole Belgian market for residential properties purchased by households is covered.

Data are available since 2005 for all index series.

The HPI is a chain-linked Laspeyres index. The current reference year is 2015.

Index with reference year 2015  and growth rates are available. Weights are given in parts in 1000.

HPI is a quarterly statistics.

Commission Regulation (EU) No 2016/792 and Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/1470.

Not available.

Regulation (EC) No 223/2009 of the European Parliament and of the Council, of 11 March 2009, on the transmission of data subject to statistical confidentiality to the Statistical Office of the European Communities.

Belgian Statistical Law of 22 March 2006.

Not applicable, only aggregate indices are published.

The release dates for HPI indexes are available on the website of Statistics Belgium (https://statbel.fgov.be/en/calendar).

The release calendar for all statistics produced by Statistics Belgium is available at the following address: http://statbel.fgov.be/en/statistics/organisation/statistics_belgium/dissemination/release_calendar/

HPI indexes are published on the website of Statistics Belgium (https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/house-price-index).

Quarterly indices and annual weights are available.

Online press releases are available on the website of Statistics Belgium (https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/house-price-index).

Not available.

Tables with HPI indexes and weights are available on the website of Statistics Belgium (https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/house-price-index#figures).

Micro-data is not published.

Not available.

HPI methodology is briefly described in a technical note available on the website of Statistics Belgium (https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/house-price-index#documents).

Not available.

Statistics Belgium has an own developed quality management system using an independent validation service which validates data before publication or transfer to Eurostat. Another aspect is the use of Quality Indicators for all statistics. Every year the quality of statistics produced by Statistics Belgium are assessed using quality indicators. The criteria used are relevance, accuracy, timeliness, coherence and comparability, cost and burden, process quality and accessibility.

The quality of the HPI index is assessed on the basis of the technical manual on owner-occupied housing and house price indices published by Eurostat.

HPI indices are developed according to the methodology developed by the Real Estate Price Statistics Working Group and in line with Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/1470 and the handbook on Residential Property Prices Indices published by Eurostat. This methodology is aimed at producing indices which respond to the needs of users interested in studying the behaviour of the housing market. Key users are the ECB, National Central Banks, financial institutions and economic analysts.

A user satisfaction survey is carried out by Statistics Belgium. The survey and the results can be found in Statistics Belgium website, in French and Dutch.

All expenditures covered in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/1470 regulation are taken into account when they represent at least 5% of expenditures.

For existing dwellings, indices are based on administrative data sources which cover the whole universe and thus the accuracy is guaranteed by default. 

However, the land registry data for newly built dwellings do not cover the whole universe because characteristics are often incomplete or not added in timely manner. Therefore, the transactions for dwellings build in the last 5 years are used as a proxy for the index of newly built dwellings for the most recent quarter.

Non-probability sampling is used.

Not available

Data are sent within the delays prescribed by Regulation (EU) 2016/792 (t+85 days after the end of the reference period for the indices). Data are published around 90 days after the reference period.

Not applicable.

The HPI indexes are only compiled at the country level. Regional indexes are currently not available put are scheduled to be published in 2024. However, HPI is developed according to the methodology presented in the handbook on Residential Property Prices Indices edited by Eurostat and aimed to be comparable across European countries.

HPI indices are comparable over time.

Purchase of existing dwellings partly overlap with statistics on the housing market published on https://statbel.fgov.be/en/themes/housing/real-estate. However, the methodology used in these statistics differs from the methods used in the HPI which only focuses on the household sector and which takes into account quality changes using the hedonic repricing method (see 18.5).

HPI sub-indexes are checked for consistency.

The HPI is subjected to revisions according to Implementing Regulation (EU) 2023/1470 

The indexes for the last available quarter should be considered as provisional and are revised a quarter later due to the fact that additional data from the land registry has been obtained. Exceptional revisions are announced via press releases.

See below.

For the primary and secondary market related indices (purchase of newly built and existing dwellings), data of the land registry are used. The producer price for the construction sector was used until end of 2012 as a proxy for newly built dwellings.

Land registry (same as for the prices).

The source data for house sales indicator is the same as for the house price index, namely the data from land registry on real estate transactions.

All data are collected quarterly.

Administrative data are transferred via SFTP.

Statistical outlier detection methods are applied on the administrative data.

See below. 

See below.

The house price index is a Laspeyres-type price index.

HPI subindices are first computed by property type separately. These indices on basis Q4/t-1 are then aggregated using the Laspeyres formula with the relevant weights (see 18.5.1.3).

Weights of the different items of HPI are annually revised using the most recent national account data (t-2) for new dwellings. Gross fixed capital formation in housing by households is used and is price updated to the last quarter of year t-1. Data on building permits (namely the number of permits issued for renovation or for new constructions) are used to split gross fixed capital formation in housing between purchase of new dwellings and self-build dwellings and major renovations. The latter part is excluded from the HPI weights and is used in OOH weights. The total value for the purchase of building land based on Land registry data is added to include the value of land in the weight for newly built dwellings.

The weights for the purchase of existing dwellings are based on the Land registry data (t-1) and are computed as the total transaction costs for each type of properties on the secundary market.

The weight for the purchase of newly buit dwellings is based on national account data  from t-2 and is price updated to t-1 using the price index for newly built dwellings. The weight for the purchase of existing dwellings is based on transaction data for year t-1 and is therefore not price updated.

All sub-indices are first computed based on the fourth quarter of previous year. These short-term indices are then chained to obtain a long-term series and this serie is rebased so that the average of the indices of the reference year (currently 2015) is equal to 100.

The hedonic repricing method is used to take quality changes into accounts. A log-linear specification is used and parameters are estimated using ordinary least squares for each type of property (house, apartment, and villas). Parameters used include age of the building, comfort characteristics, number of floors, number of rooms, inhabitable area, location). The location is modelled via a clustering analysis to regroup area sharing common characteristics. Regression coefficients and models are updated yearly. 

The indices are based on the hedonic repricing method.

Not applicable since the SPAR method is not used.

The indices for the purchase of existing dwellings are compiled for different property types (detached house, semi-detached house and flats). The indices for new dwellings only cover the purchase of flats.

See below.

The prices at the transfer of ownership are taken into account in all HPI sub-indices.

VAT is included in the price of new dwellings.

Taxes other than VAT are not included in the price of existing dwellings.

Not applicable, this mostly relates to mortgage interest deduction from the income tax.

The price of land is included in both prices and weights.

Housing cooperatives do not exist in Belgium.

Non-market transactions such as inheritance or sales without full right on the property are excluded from the compilation of house sales indicators and house price indices since the prices for such transactions are non-market prices and are not relevant for these statistics.

The database contains notarial deeds that appear multiple times in the database. One category is a category of deeds that have been altered several times.  Deeds can consist of acts several properties per deed. In this case a price is not consistently given to the separate properties, making it impossible to use these in the computation of indices. Deeds with multiple properties can in some cases be regrouped to a single deed. An example can be a deed with a house with an extra piece of land and a garage can be regrouped to a single observation, or an apartment with an extra cellar. The notarial deeds with a single observation and with deeds regrouped to a single observation are used to calculate the indices for the secondary market. However, the notarial deeds with single and multiple properties are used in the calculation of the weights.

Only deeds on the full value of the transaction are taken into account in the house price index and in the house sales indicators.

Threshold values are used to eliminate transactions with abnormal values for different characteristics (eg: surface, number of rooms) used in the regression models Additionally, the Cook's distance method is used to identify the outliers. Observations having a Cook's distance higher than a pre-determined threshold based on the total number of observations are excluded from the computation of the indices.

House sales indicators are currently compiled for existing dwellings because no suitable data source has been found to include new dwellings in the coverage. No adjustment are made for incompelete data source coverage for house sales indicators for existing dwellings. However, the results for the last quarter are always considered provisonal because all transactions are not registrated at the date of first publication (t + 3 months). The results of the last quarter are then revised at the next publication when the data can be considered virtually complete.

We can however observe that after 3 months, 97% of the transactions are registered. After 6 months, this share goes up to 99%.  We can therefore conclude that revisions to the previously published results will be needed for at most up to 6 months. However, these revisions are likely to be limited.

No adjustments other than quality adjustment are applied to the HPI data.

None.