Aggregate U.S. Land Prices

The data provided here contain three sets of estimates of the price and quantities of land, structures, and housing used for residential purposes in the aggregate United States.  Two of the data sets are quarterly, starting in 1975:1.  The third data set is annual covering the 1930-2000 period.  The quarterly data sets are constructed using higher quality data and are more accurate than the annual data.

In all data sets, the land price and quantity data are derived from data on housing values and estimates of structure costs using price indexes for housing and construction costs.  In both the annual and quarterly data sets, the construction cost data are derived from publicly available data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).  For the quarterly data sets, the house price data are benchmarked to an estimate of the value of the stock of housing based on micro data from the 2000 Decennial Census of Housing and 2001 Residential Finance Survey, and are extrapolated forwards and backwards from that benchmark year using the Macromarkets LLC (formerly Case-Shiller-Weiss) repeat-sales index for the first data set, and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (formerly Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight) repeat-sales index for the second data set.  For the annual data set, the house price data are benchmarked to estimates of the value of housing based on micro data from the 1930, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 Decennial Census of Housing and micro data from the 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, and 2001 Residential Finance Survey.  A cubic spline procedure is used to generate an annual house price index that is consistent with the decennial benchmark values.

CSW-based price index: aggregate land data, quarterly, 1975:1-2012:3

FHFA-based price index: aggregate land data, quarterly, 1975:1-2012:3

Decennial Census of Housing-Based price index: aggregate land data, annual, 1930-2000

In each of the three data sets, the following variables are reported:

Also note that:

1. Market values are in billions of current dollars and price indexes are set such that 2000:Q2 = 1.0.
2. "Aggregate" refers to non-farm residential units, owned and rented.  It does not include mobile homes and does not include residences owned by nonprofits.
3. The estimate of the replacement cost of residential structures does not match the BEA published values.  The estimates on this page exclude (a) all residential equipment, (b) the replacement cost of residential farm structures, (c) mobile homes, and (d) structures owned by non-profits.  Also, unlike the BEA, expenditures on "broker's commissions" are not considered to be gross investment in structures, which introduces a further downward adjustment to the BEA's estimate of the replacement cost of residential structures.

Use of data in a paper should include the following citation: Davis, Morris A. and Jonathan Heathcote, 2007, "The Price and Quantity of Residential Land in the United States," Journal of Monetary Economics, vol. 54 (8), p. 2595-2620; data located at Land and Property Values in the U.S., Lincoln Institute of Land Policy http://www.lincolninst.edu/resources/