Mass appraisal of residential real estate using multilevel modelling

Mass appraisal, or the automatic valuation of a large number of real estate assets, has attracted the attention of many researchers, who have mainly approached this issue employing traditional econometric models such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS). However, this method does not consider the hierarchical structure of the data and therefore assumes the unrealistic hypothesis of the independence of the individuals in the sample. This paper proposes the use of the Hierarchical Linear Model (HLM) to overcome this limitation. The HLM also gives valuable information on the percentage of the variance error caused by each level in the hierarchical model. In this study HLM was applied to a large dat…