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UK commercial property forecasting: the devil is in the data

The modelling of UK property markets using construction statistics faces considerable problems because of the way in which those statistics are drawn up. These difficulties are shown here to include data accuracy; the impact of large projects; the cost indices used to deflate current price data; missing information; the addition of unrecorded output and estimates that induce serial correlation. Such problems make the data relatively poor bases on which to formulate property market forecasts. Ex post forecasting analysis over two horizons showed that simple regression models, which include variables that affect development profitability, did not outperform ARIMA models, which are based solely on the construction statistics. The available floor-space data are also poor indicators of building supply. There seems to be a strong case for the government to improve the quality of the commercial supply data it provides.