The data preparation process in real estate: Guidance and review

Abstract

Very little discussion in the real estate literature or the classroom is given to acquiring, managing, cleaning, and preparing large datasets (collectively, the data preparation process). In this paper, we examine the general state of real estate data, the research on data preparation and provide common examples of issues encountered while working with property-level data. We also examine the characteristics that make working with real estate data highly unique and occasionally very difficult: it is largely un-standardized, often lacks sufficient labeling, and is spatial and temporal in nature. We conclude by examining a sample of published research from the Journal of Real Estate Research, Real Estate Economics, and the Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics to gauge how documentation of the data preparation process in the peer-reviewed literature has changed over time.