Price Surfaces: Visualization of Dwelling Market Variations in Helsinki Metropolitan Area, Finland

VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland possesses a large database of dwelling prices based on real transactions from all over Finland starting from the year 1970. The database contains over 500 000 dwelling and real estate transactions. This paper presents the first attempt to visualize spatial and temporal changes of dwelling prices by using GIS based spatial analysis methodology. The product of the analysis process consists of a series of maps, so called price-surfaces, which can be used to monitor the development of local dwelling markets by localizing its hot spots and stagnating areas. The pilot study covers the Helsinki Metropolitan Area and the time period of the last 23 years. The maps present surfaces of dwelling prices covering all the residential areas of the HMA. The initial point datasets are interpolated into regional grids by using Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) method