Developing Historical Time Series In A Market Without External Market Valuations Part 2: An Inventory Of Possibilities

"The last twenty years of the 20th century have shown some significant changes in the performance measurement of real estate. Under pressure of the major asset classes stocks and bonds in which case advanced performance measurement systems are common as a tool for investment decisions in these asset classes, the asset class real estate was forced to take action in this field. The anglo saxon countries UK, USA and Canada and Australia had already developed performance measurement systems of some sort. The Frank Russel index started already in 1975 followed by the Investment Property Databank (IPD) in 1985 and the Australian Index was established soon there after. At the beginning of the nineties initiatives for a real estate index were developed in France, Ireland and the Netherlands, mainly in cooperation with IPD More recently Sweden, Germany, South Africa developed indices and feasibility studies are currently underway in Belgium, Denmark and Portugal. In the Netherlands the initiative was taken by the Real Estate Council of the Netherlands (ROZ), which is an umbrella organisation for property owners' interests. It lasted until 1996 before the ROZ/IPD real estate index in the Netherlands was published for the first time. The major difference in the publication at that moment was that Ireland was able to include historical time series in their presentation and the Netherlands not. Attempts had been made by using brokerage data from the past but they failed. The reasons why will be discussed later in detail but one obvious one was the fact that unlike the Anglo-Saxon countries where regular yearly valuations of real estate are a must, in the Netherlands and in general in continental European valuations are not embedded in a regular yearly process. In this article attempts are made and described to find solutions for the lack of valuation data in different ways. The ultimate goal is to come to a common approach which will be applicable in each country without sufficient valuation information so that reasonable simulations will create a """"reliable"""" picture of the past."