East European Regional   

36

Housing Sector Assistance Project   

#

Systematic Data on Housing Market Values and Mortgage Credit.

  Poland

needs to develop systematic data collection systems for both housing and housing finance

data.  Housing data include market rents, market prices of recently sold homes, and

market values of owned homes (and perhaps better data on  completions ).  The mortgage

credit aggregates would include data on both existing portfolios and new originations; the

data would be reported via NBP specifications by the banks to the NBP, as noted above.

The housing value data, as in the United States, would come from a variety of

sources.   Market based rents need to be reported on a consistent basis n

33

ationwide.  With

regard to owned housing, both housing just sold and the existing housing stock need to

be valued using consistent estimation and recording procedures; in part, this

recommendation pertains to suggestions for GUS regarding macroeconomic data, noted

above.  In addition, Poland needs to solve the problem of under reporting of sales values

(for tax avoidance purposes).  If a variable with a decided bias such as that caused by

under reporting is used in estimation, the results of any estimation of demand models will

be inaccurate.

34

33

A forthcoming UIC report, sponsored by USAID, addresses some of the issues in recording of sales

values.  See  Property Valuation and Appraisal: U.S. Information Systems and Recommendations for Poland. 

34

More specifically, the estimated parameters will be biased.  And there are many other very important

reasons to have accurate data on house value, including the interests of the lending banks, the NBP, realtors, and

appraisers.