Experimental statistics

The cooperation between ingatlan.com and the Hungarian Central Statistical Office in 2020 has enabled the statistical exploitation of a market database. Ingatlan.com has a very extensive database containing hundreds of thousands of individual advertisements, which is suitable for statistical processing and monitoring the development of market rents in terms of both content and structure.

The results published here are experimental statistics, i.e. results that are based on some novel, innovative solution. In the case of the HCSO-ingatlan.com rent index, this means that the available data do not cover the whole of the observed population. However, the results are indispensable for understanding housing market developments and therefore undoubtedly deserve a place in the statistical information system.

Statistical monitoring of the Hungarian market rental sector is hampered by several factors. Its actors are often hidden, its relationships are rapidly changing and, in many respects, do not fit into the conceptual framework of traditional statistical data collection, and it is difficult to observe them using traditional statistical approaches. It is therefore extremely difficult to make reliable measurements of the size of the rental sector, its occupants and, not least, its price conditions.

At the same time, private renting has increased markedly in recent years and has become a major factor in the urban housing situation. Statistical information on the evolution of rents is now demanded not only by policy makers, market players and researchers, but also by the general public, and the gap left by the lack of reliable data is filled by partial information, data of uncertain origin and validity.

The cooperation between ingatlan.com and the Hungarian Central Statistical Office is a significant step forward in this respect. The combination of this database and the relevant data on the housing market available from the HCSO system allows analyses to be carried out that could not be done by either of the two partners separately. A further advantage of the cooperation is that it provides very fast access to the data, so that information on this particularly sensitive segment of the housing market can be available within a few days after the reference period. To this end, the HCSO receives data from the ingatlan.com database on a monthly basis.

The obtained results provide information on the development of asking rents, so they reflect the rental level of dwellings available to those just entering the market, and this - as we have also shown previously - significantly differs from the values typical of dwellings actually rented in the given period.