Baptiste Meunier

Internal seminars
phd seminar

Baptiste Meunier

Banque de France, AMSE
Web-scraping housing prices in real-time: The Covid-19 crisis in the UK
Venue

MEGA Salle Carine Nourry

MEGA - Salle Carine Nourry

Maison de l'économie et de la gestion d'Aix
424 chemin du viaduc
13080 Aix-en-Provence

Date(s)
Tuesday, January 3 2023| 11:00am to 11:30am
Contact(s)

Camille Hainnaux: camille.hainnaux[at]univ-amu.fr
Daniela Horta Saenz: daniela.horta-saenz[at]univ-amu.fr
Jade Ponsard: jade.ponsard[at]univ-amu.fr
Nathan Vieira: nathan.vieira[at]univ-amu.fr

Abstract

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.