Objectified Housing Sales and Rent Prices in Representative Household Surveys: the Impact on Macroeconomic Statistics

For aggregate housing and wealth statistics to be reliable, they need to cover the entire housing stock. This requires hypothetical values for properties that are not currently on the market for sale or for rent. To achieve such values, we impute hypothetical sales and rent prices in the Luxembourg Household Finance and Consumption Survey using hedonic models estimated on observable market data. These imputations replace estimates reported by survey participants. We find that participants’ tendency to over- or under-report housing values is correlated with their tenure length, tenure type, dwelling type, as well as their income and wealth. We detect large regional variation in price-to-rent, price-to-income and rent-to-income ratios. A microsimulation using these imputed values reveals significant affordability concerns: only 18% of renters could theoretically afford to purchase the dwelling they currently occupy at market prices.