Methodology

What the index measures

Two things, kept deliberately separate because they answer different questions:

• Advertised price per square metre (USD). The asking price of residential stock, normalised to a per-m² figure so units of different sizes are comparable. These are asking prices, not settled transaction prices — see the limitations below.
• Indicative gross rental yield. Annualised advertised rent divided by advertised price, expressed as a percentage. It is a gross figure: it does not deduct service charges, vacancy, management, or tax. The honest, net picture is set out in our guide to reading Cambodian rental yields.

Coverage

The index currently spans 4 markets and 3 segments, quarterly.

• Cities: Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville, Siem Reap, Kampot.
• Segments: Condominium (mid-market), Condominium (high-end), Landed (borey).
• Periods: 2024-Q1 to 2026-Q1. Phnom Penh, the deepest market, carries the full back-series; secondary cities are built up quarter by quarter as the sample matures.

How the index value is calculated

The pipeline is intentionally simple and transparent:

1. Collect residential listings for each city and segment over the quarter.
2. Clean — drop duplicates and obvious outliers, normalise to price per m².
3. Aggregate to a representative price per (period, city, segment), recording the sample size behind each figure.
4. Rebase each series so the base period (2024-Q1) equals 100. An index value of 103 means prices are 3% above the base period; 97 means 3% below.

The headline number tracks one reference series — Phnom Penh, Condominium (mid-market) — because it is the most-traded, best-sampled slice of the market. Other series are shown alongside it rather than blended into a single composite, so no weighting choice is hidden from you.

Limitations — read these

Being independent means being honest about what the data is not. Cambodia is a thin-data market, and this index inherits those constraints:

• Asking prices, not transactions. Cambodia has no comprehensive public register of settled residential prices. Advertised prices typically sit above achieved prices, especially in a soft market, so read levels with that bias in mind. Trends are more reliable than absolute levels.
• Small samples in secondary cities. Sihanoukville, Siem Reap, and Kampot have far fewer listings than Phnom Penh; their figures are more volatile and carry the sample size (n) so you can weight them accordingly.
• No hedonic quality adjustment yet. The index does not (yet) control for changes in the mix of listings — floor, finish, building age. A shift in what is being advertised can move the number independently of true price change.
• USD-denominated. Pricing follows the market's US-dollar convention; it does not isolate riel movements.

Update cadence & versioning

The index is published quarterly. This release was last updated 2026-04-15; the next is due 2026-07-15. The methodology carries its own version (0.1) — if we change how the index is built, the version increments and the change is noted in the changelog below, so a citation stays interpretable.

From sample to sourced data

This is the same path the rest of the platform took: ship the structure first, clearly labelled as illustrative, then drop sourced data into an unchanged schema. When real observations replace the sample set, the sample notices come down, the source is attributed, and every derived view — the page, the chart, the JSON and CSV downloads, the structured data — updates automatically. Nothing about how you read or cite the index changes.

Reuse & citation

The full dataset is free to download (JSON · CSV) and reuse with attribution and a link back to the index page. We would rather be the cited source than gatekeep the numbers.

Changelog

• v0.1 — Initial structure: 4 cities, 3 segments, quarterly, rebased to 100 at 2024-Q1. Illustrative sample data.