by Alex Catalano
The first of the long-awaited estate agents’ co-operative research efforts is being launched by “The big four”.
Jones Lang Wootton, Hillier Parker, Richard Ellis and Healey & Baker have pooled their data and published a pilot study called The Property Index.
The four’s ambition is to get “maximum possible participation” from other firms and investing institutions and produce “the authoritative index of the property market”. The idea is that contributors will provide aggregate data on the capital values and income of their holdings.
The four firms will be underwriting the cost of compiling the index, but it will be produced by an “independent body”. According to Charles Follows, an associate in Healey & Baker’s investment department, this means an organisation that is not active in the property market, perhaps an academic institution.
The set-up proposed by the four bears a strong similarity to the Investment Property Databank, sponsored by six other firms (Chestertons, Cluttons, Debenham Tewson & Chinnocks, Drivers Jonas, Savills and Weatherall Green & Smith) and launched last year. IPDB, however, collects the data itself from its contributors on a property-by-property basis.
Charles Follows says that The Property Index is meant to be a general indicator of the market rather than a more detailed analysis of trends and sectors.
“What we believe is that not everyone will want to go into IPDB’s copious data requirements,” he says.
The four say that IPDB has agreed to add its figures to The Property Index, provided the sources of the data agree.
“There’s no formal agreement,” says Charles Follows. “It’s an understanding between us.”
According to Rafe Clutton, the firms sponsoring IPDB did indicate that they might be willing to put their aggregate figures in with the four others, and “have been discussing forms of co-operation which might go beyond that”.
However, the precise nature of the link-up between the two groups — and their data sets — seems far from agreed. “No technical discussions have taken place to date on how we would merge the two sources,” says Rupert Nabarro, head of IPDB.
And the different approaches of the two groups may be hard to reconcile.
“There are really immense difficulties in getting information on a standard basis,” says Rupert Nabarro. “And if different sets of people are collecting it you can’t place reliability on the result. If you’re going to create an accurate property market indicator you can’t do it on the basis of whole fund data.”
