FHB Agricultural Land Price Index

The FHB Agricultural Land Price Index was first published in 2010. It measures the nominal and real (deflated by CPI) price increase of the Hungarian agricultural land prices.The Agricultural Land Price Index was computed on the basis of transaction data received from the Stamp Duty Office ((later the National Tax Office).The data processed covers the period between 2000 and the first half of 2015. The value of the index is normalised with the average for the year 2000, i.e. the average index value in 2000 is 100. In order to ensure that the Index reflects real market trends, the FHB Land Price Index analysis only includes transactions that have been confirmed by FHB’s property surveyors. The purpose of the data filtering is to measure the changes in prices of lands that are actually utilised; i.e. data that may refer to speculative investments when the land is bought only in the hope that it will later be upgraded to be municipal territory were excluded from the analysis. Similarly to FHB House Price Index, FHB Agricultural Land Price Index was also prepared by hedonic method. Lands sold in different periods have different characteristics, thus the evolution of average prices are affected by the composition of the lands sold. By managing the composition effect, the hedonic method helped us to detect the real changes in prices. The most important factors that have been taken into account are the size, the location and the utilisation of land.