Statistical Services in Relation to Commercial Real Estate Markets and Consumer Price Statistics- Lot 1: Automatic data collection (web scraping) from commercial real estate portals

The size of the commercial real estate (CRE) sector and its strong procyclicality make it a crucial pillar of macroeconomic, financial, and monetary stability of the European Union and its Member States. At the same time, as has been exposed by the 2008 crisis, high level of the CRE sector interconnectedness with both financial and real economy represents an important source of systemic risk. This highlights the importance of the CRE markets for a sound macroprudential oversight throughout the EU.

The analysis and monitoring of the CRE sector is severely hampered by the absence of common definition and internationally accepted classification of the ‘commercial real estate’ (or ‘commercial property’), as well as the lack of harmonised and accurate data on the CRE markets. This not only limits the intra-EU comparability of the national CRE sectors, but more importantly, undermines the possibility to develop comprehensive and reliable CRE indices. The latter are particularly important for the national and the EU-level statistics, macroeconomic and macroprudential oversight and policymaking, as well as individual investment decision making.

The main objective of this project is to evaluate the feasibility of producing price or rent indices for CRE from portals that advertise CRE of sale or for rent, as well as to assess the quality of the resulting indices. The project aims also to bridge data and information gaps in the commercial real estate sector.

The following activities will be carried out during the implementation phase:

(1) assess and evaluate available national CRE portals in the 21 EU Member States;

(2) develop the web scraping tool and apply it to extract the data from the selected national CRE portals;

(3) produce price and/or rent CRE indices;

(4) assess the quality of the produced indices.

Funding: Eurostat

Leader: CASE – Center for Social and Economic Research

Partner: Digital Economy Lab of the University of Warsaw

Experts involved: Misha Bonch- Osmolovskiy, Adam Śmietanka, Kateryna Karunska, Chihiro Shimizu