Private Nonresidential Building and Apartment Prices

In a previous paper, Loebach (2005), I examined the feasibility of using a data base of contracts from F.W. Dodge to construction nonresidential building price indexes for a single state. This paper is an extension of that research that explores price indexes for seven types of nonresidential buildings and apartments using a national data set for the time period 1995 to 2004. Both annual and quarterly price indexes are generated and analyzed. It is found that the hedonic price measures do not increase faster than those indexes currently used in the NIPA’s and many hedonic price measure increase 0.5% to 2% per year less than those currently used. Some suggestions are made as to how the procedures used in this paper can be used in an on-going production framework.