Asking prices as proxy for transaction prices? New evidence from the Berlin housing market

With increasing data availability through online real estate listing platforms more and more asking price data is used in research as a proxy to investigate price dynamics in real estate markets. This practice is facing criticism with regard to the robustness of the results generated, as asking price data only provide a biased picture of the underlying dynamics due to possible deviations from the price actually paid (transaction price). There has been limited research, whether the spread between asking and transaction prices is systematic or erratic. This study adds to this literature by being the first paper to analyse the relationship for a large data set of micro locations of the Berlin housing market. We analyse two unique data sets from the Berlin Expert Committee for Property Values and Immoscout24, containing all registered transaction and asking prices between 2007 and 2022. With the available variables, we are able to create distinctly assignable transaction/offer price pairs for almost all observations in the dataset and therefore estimate representative spreads in Germany's largest housing market.