Overview - Housing price statistics
Which information can I find here?
This section covers the following statistics:
- House Price Index (HPI): This measures the changes in the transaction prices of residential properties, both newly built and existing, purchased by households;
- House sales: This covers the changes in the total number and value of housing transactions purchased by households;
- Owner-Occupied Housing Price Index (OOHPI): This measures the changes in the transaction prices of dwellings purchased for own-use and the cost of all goods and services that households purchase in their role as owners-occupiers of dwellings.
For more information, please see 'Information on data' in this section.
What is this data used for and why is it important?
In recent years, the analysis of housing markets has intensified as has the demand for high quality statistics on national, euro area and EU housing, in particular on residential property price indices.
Eurostat and the national statistical institutes have been working together since 2002 on a series of pilot projects to set up a system to provide harmonised data for residential property prices at European level. Prior to this work, there was very little comparability between national data on housing prices within the EU. The development of comparable, timely and frequent statistics on changes in residential property prices has been considered an essential target for European statistics.
In this context, the terms 'residential property price', 'house price' and 'dwelling price' are used interchangeably to describe the price developments of all residential properties purchased by households (flats, detached houses, terraced houses, etc.), both new and existing, independent of their final use and independent of their previous owners. The emphasis is on market prices, with non-market prices being ruled out from the scope of the house price indices (self-build dwellings are therefore excluded). The price of dwellings follows a gross acquisition concept, i.e. it includes the land price component.
