Tracking Home-Owners' Sentiments: Subjective Indices and Convergent Validity

Surveys regularly ask home-owners to estimate the current market value of their dwelling. We develop suitable techniques to construct hedonic and repeat-sales style house price indices from these owner-estimated-values and link the resulting series to a large set of quality-adjusted residential property price indices estimated from transaction data allowing us to perform various convergent validity tests. Based on results for 20 countries, several decades and different OEV elicitation techniques, we conclude that the "wisdom of the home-owner crowd" is sufficient to study objective house price dynamics. Yet, surveys fail to accurately measure house price levels.