On the usefullness of statistical methods in real estate valuation

Statistical methods enable obtaining valuable information about real estate market. The information is objective and can be usefull both for individual and mass appraisal. This paper discusses selected issues related to the use of the regression methods in the real estate valuation. They are the metod of trend estimation, the metod of calculation of the price - size relationship for undeveloped land, and the functional form of the distribution function of unit land prices of undeveloped land. The analysis was based on a few thousands of sale transactions in Kraków. This paper also discusses selected issues related to the use of the mul-tiple linear regression in the real estate valuation. They are the functional form of the model, number of the attributes, trend, scale of the values of the attributes and the form of adjustments. Arguments that the dates of sales should be excluded from the list of real estate attributes are brought forward. Also, the paper argues that the regression model should contain an intercept parameter and the scale of the values of the attributes should start from zero.     ...