The real estate market is highly intermediated, with 90 percent of buyers and sellers hiring an agent to help them transact a house. However, low barriers to entry and fixed commission rates result in a market where inexperienced intermediaries have a large market share, especially following...

In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 145 indicators and ten types of forecast combination schemes to predict housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. We are interested in whether local business confidence indicators facilitate substantial improvements of the forecasts,...