A Hedonic Residential Real Estate Index for Jamaica: A Pilot Study of the Kingston & St. Andrew Region

This paper presents a framework for the construction of a residential real estate price index for Jamaica. This real estate price index will consist of a sales value-weighted aggregation of price sub-indices across geographical regions or zones. In this study, a hedonic price imputation model for housing in the parishes of Kingston & St. Andrew is estimated using mortgage transaction and assessment information on dwellings over the period 2003 to 2007 collected by the National Housing Trust. This approach allows for the efficient use of estimated marginal contributions for each real estate characteristic to construct a price index without any further econometric updating, subject to stability tests, for typically four to five years. JEL Classification: C43, C51, O18