Purpose – We use a large and rich data set consisting of over 123,000 single-family houses sold in Switzerland between 2005 and 2017 to investigate the accuracy and volatility of different methods for estimating and updating hedonic valuation models.Design/methodology/approach – We apply six...

The measurement of house price movements is a vital topic from both academic and practical perspectives and hence has been the focus of much research. There is almost unanimous consensus in the literature that house price indexes should control for the quality of properties; the most widely used...

A house is a bundle of land and improvements, with the weights of the two components varying both over time and across locations. We capture the land intensity or 'leverage' of a property by measuring the ratio of land to total value. This is accomplished using transactions data for single...

In contrast to many other countries, Switzerland generally has not seen soaring house prices in the 2000s and house prices have only recently started to diminish slightly. Also, Swiss authorities do not engage in trying to increase the homeownership rate much above its current level. In this...

Structured additive regression (STAR) models are a rich class of regression models that include the generalized linear model (GLM) and the generalized additive model (GAM). STAR models can be fitted by Bayesian approaches, component-wise gradient boosting, penalized least-squares, and deep...

In some applications of supervised machine learning, it is desirable to trade model complexity with greater interpretability for some covariates while letting other covariates remain a "black box". An important example is hedonic property valuation modeling, where machine learning techniques...