Abstract

We compare four traditional repeat sales indices to a recently developed autoregressive index that makes use of the repeat sales methodology but incorporates single sales and a location effect. Qualitative comparisons on statistical issues including the effect of gap time on sales, use of hedonic information, and treatment of single and repeat sales are addressed. Furthermore, predictive ability is used as a quantitative metric in the analysis using data from home sales in 20 metropolitan areas in the United States. The indices tend to track each other over time; however, the differences are substantial enough to be of interest, and we find that the autoregressive index performs best overall.