Repeat Sales Methods for Growing Cities and Short Horizons

The accurate estimation of real estate indices is important for many purposes. A common method to estimate these indices is to use a repeatâ€sales procedure. Although this does not require property attributes, this method discards a large amount of sales. This paper proposes a method that can be used to incorporate a significant percentage of these discarded observations without requiring additional data collection by the researcher. We apply our method to the metropolitan statistical areas of Phoenix and Seattle and find that standard errors are on average twoâ€thirds the value of standard errors from a repeatâ€sales procedure in Seattle and threeâ€eighths the value in Phoenix.