Real Estate Price Indexes, The Italian Case

House prices in Italy: the statistics used at the Bank of Italy (pdf)
Presentation (pdf)
Roberto Sabbatini et al, Banca d’Italia


Houses constitute a significant share of the household wealth. Therefore, house price dynamics is a key factor in the process of reallocation of household wealth (Davies and Shorrocks, 1999), in interacting with financial asset prices (Sutton, 2002); it can impact on economic activity and, in turn, on inflation, through various channels. Moreover, house price developments can affect labour mobility (Cannari et al., 2000).


Despite this importance, official statistics on house prices are not available in most industrialised countries; for the European Union, in the medium term this informative gap should be closed once the work undertaken by National Statistical Institutes and coordinated by Eurostat in the context of the Working Group on the Harmonization of Consumer Price Indices will be finalized. The lack of information on house prices is particularly relevant in Italy, where households’ preference for housing wealth is very high, due also to the market orientation of Italian households for owner-occupation (Paiella, 2001;Di Addario, 2002).