Mission

The MIT Center for Real Estate’s Price Dynamics Platform (PDP, or “Platform” for short) serves at the intersection between Academia and the Real Estate Industry. Seeded by a generous gift from MIT/CRE Industry Partner firm Real Capital Analytics in 2017, the Platform utilizes the newest data combined with cutting-edge and interdisciplinary econometric techniques from many fields not just real estate, such as (space) navigation, weather forecasts, and healthcare. We develop innovative tools that potentially have a global impact for real estate stakeholders, resulting in a more transparent and efficient real estate market.

Economic models used for many important decisions, such as: property investment and valuation,  mortgage prepayments and defaults, measures of national and international income and wealth, the total value of collateral behind a portfolio of mortgage loans, real estate derivatives, and portfolio allocations – among many other applications – are all informed by models of real estate valuation and price dynamics. The Platform aims to fill gaps and push the frontier of rigorous, empirically based quantitative knowledge and information in an industry that has historically been characterized by a shortage of good data and econometric models tailored to its specific needs.

Our research focuses on developing applications and models used for real estate price indices for markets with scarce observations, forecasting prices, and exploring the mass valuation of real estate using machine learning.