Daniela Arlia

In this paper, we present a new data set describing local rental markets in Germany between the years 2011-2018, based on Internet ads collected through web-scraping. We compare these data with other official sources, as the GSOEP and the BBSR Rent Index, and we show that the web-scraping data can be a reliable source of information on the housing markets. We then exploit the richness of information in the ads to construct quality-adjusted rent indices using the hedonic approach and analyze the dynamics of rents and their distribution both between and within local labor markets. Finally, we build housing inequality indicators to study how this has changed. Despite the limited period of analysis, we find that housing inequality has slightly increased and, more interesting, these increases are driven by changes in the relative values of locations within local labor markets.