Monitoring 15 Years of Residential House Price Development in Hungary With the Help of the FHB House Price Index

The working paper presents the development of the housing market in Hungary between 1998 and 2013 through the history of the FHB House Price Index. For computing the FHB House Price Index FHB applied the hedonic method. At its first publication in 2009 the Index was based on actual transaction data of residential real estate collected from the year of 1998 from appr. 1,000,000 residential properties located in appr. 3,200 municipalities. The source of data include the valuation records of FHB Mortgage Bank ,as well as the buying - selling transaction database purchased from NAV, the national tax authority. Since its first publication the Index is updated on a quarterly basis. The average index value in 2000 was 100 later it peaked at 200,7 in the first quarter of 2008. The 15 years of the housing price history were divided into 4 significantly different eras. When analysing the development of the housing market, relations between selected macroeconomic and financial environment indicators , money market and credit market indices and other data of the housing market were also taken into consideration.