House Sales Indicators - A New Dataset Able to Capture Housing Market Developments in Europe

Among the housing statistics published by Eurostat, housing price statistics are available for more than a decade. However, house sales statistics in number and value of transactions are publicly available only since summer 2020 capturing quarterly information for many European countries at least since 2015. Housing statistics are key for policy makers but also for households due to their economic and social importance. In the surveillance of the COVID 19 impact on economic activities, housing prices did not yet show a huge impact of the economic downturn in many countries. In contrast, house sales indicated a slowdown of housing market activities. Consequently, these indicators are essential for analyzing crisis developments. During the ERES conference begin June 2021 the data for all the quarters in 2020 will be available in the Eurostat database encompassing house sales indicators for 24 European countries. Every quarter, Eurostat publishes the following indicators: house prices with a breakdown for new and existing dwellings, owner occupiers housing price indices, numbers and volumes of house sales. These indicators support not only medium and long-term analyses of this key sector of the economy but in addition allow monitoring crisis effects. The presentation provides a preliminary analysis for European countries and will guide to find the requested information on the Eurostat website which is free of charge and can be consulted on https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/.