Real Estate Prices Around the World: In Dollars, Gold and Bitcoin

US cities (New York, San Francisco, Miami, Dallas)

S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Home Price Index for each metro area, published monthly by S&P and retrieved via FRED, the database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. It is a repeat-sales index: it tracks price changes of the same homes over time.

German cities (Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin)

GREIX (German Real Estate Index), a research project at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. It is based on notarized purchase prices collected by the local expert committees (Gutachterausschüsse) and uses hedonic methods that adjust for quality differences between properties. We use the condominium (Eigentumswohnungen) index. GREIX publishes quarterly, so each quarter's value is held constant across its three months on the charts. Results can differ from figures published by the local expert committees.

Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Perth)

Median sale price of established houses in each capital city, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). This is a raw median price in Australian dollars, not a quality-adjusted index, so it can move with the mix of homes sold. The ABS publishes it quarterly, so each quarter's value is held constant across its three months on the charts.

Chinese city (Shanghai)

The second-hand (resale) residential price index for Shanghai from China's National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), based on its monthly survey of 70 cities. NBS publishes only month-on-month changes, so we chain them into an index level starting from December 2010. We retrieve the figures via Eastmoney, a Chinese financial data portal that republishes the NBS data. NBS rounds each change to one decimal, so the chained index can differ slightly from NBS's own year-on-year figures. Official Chinese price indices are survey-based and generally move more smoothly than transaction-based measures.

Singapore

The Private Residential Property Price Index from Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), retrieved via Singapore's open-data portal (data.gov.sg). It covers private housing, both landed homes and condominiums, but not public HDB flats, which most Singapore residents live in. It is a stratified hedonic index, meaning it adjusts for differences in the properties sold. URA publishes it quarterly, so each quarter's value is held constant across its three months on the charts.

Contains information from the Private Residential Property Price Index (Base Quarter 2009-Q1 = 100), Quarterly, accessed monthly from data.gov.sg, which is made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0.

Hong Kong

The private domestic property price index of Hong Kong's Rating and Valuation Department, covering all flat sizes, retrieved via the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which republishes it. The Hong Kong dollar is pegged to the US dollar, so the currency conversion has little effect on these lines. The BIS publishes it quarterly, so each quarter's value is held constant across its three months on the charts.

How the charts are calculated

Every line is rebased to 100 at the start of the selected timeframe. For the gold and Bitcoin charts, each home price index is divided by the USD price of that asset in the same month. Values quoted in other currencies (euros, Australian dollars, Chinese yuan, Singapore dollars, Hong Kong dollars) are converted to US dollars using month-end exchange rates from FRED before rebasing, so all cities are in the same currency. Because of this, those lines include currency moves and will differ from the source's own local-currency charts. The charts show relative change since the start of the selected timeframe, not what a home costs.