Web-scraping housing prices in real-time: The Covid-19 crisis in the UK

Jean-Charles Bricongne, Baptiste Meunier and Sylvain Pouget
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Sylvain Pouget: Grenoble INP ENSIMAG - École nationale supérieure d'informatique et de mathématiques appliquées - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes - Grenoble INP - Institut polytechnique de Grenoble - Grenoble Institute of Technology - UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes

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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.

Keywords: Housing; Real time; Big data; Web-scraping; High frequency; United Kingdom (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big and nep-ure
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Published in Journal of Housing Economics, 2023, COVID-19’s Impacts on Housing Markets, 59, pp.101906. ⟨10.1016/j.jhe.2022.101906⟩

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Journal Article: Web-scraping housing prices in real-time: The Covid-19 crisis in the UK (2023)
Working Paper: Web-scraping housing prices in real-time: The Covid-19 crisis in the UK (2023)
Working Paper: Web Scraping Housing Prices in Real-time: the Covid-19 Crisis in the UK (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04064185

DOI: 10.1016/j.jhe.2022.101906

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