Development of Hedonic Office Rent Indices

Simon Kempf has developed hedonic (quality-adjusted) office rent indices for German metropolitan areas. His study explores new territory as it constructs, for the first time, such indices for Germany. The author thereby has taken into account the different qualities of the underlying lease contracts regarding location factors, lease factors, building factors, equipment and layout factors of the office rental unit – using more than 22,005 office lease contracts stored in the Rental Databank of IPD GmbH in Wiesbaden. This hedonic index construction methodology is well known among real estate researchers and statisticians, but it has been mainly used in the residential sector. As a second novelty the multiple imputation method in the statistical analysis to solve the problem of missing data is employed. Quality-adjusted office rent indices serve as market and economic indicators as well as a bench-marking instrument.