OECD House Price Tracker

Housing is key to wellbeing. Real estate typically forms the most important asset of households and their most important source of debt. Not surprisingly given their correlation with the economic cycle, house prices are also one of the most widely tracked economic indicators. However, despite their importance, including for macroeconomic policymaking as the 2008-09 financial crisis well illustrated, there are few internationally comparable statistics to show house price developments across regions and cities within countries. This is despite the common understanding that changes in house prices within countries are rarely uniform (e.g. there may be ‘ripple’ effects). Policies that target the ‘national’ therefore may miss differences across regions and in turn add to the geography of discontent. The OECD has developed a database on national and regional house price indices that aims to fill this gap.