I have spent my career in property valuation. SHIFT is not a property index. It does not measure prices, rents or values, and it is not a valuation standard. It measures one thing: how demand for work has changed.
What SHIFT measures
SHIFT is a labour-demand shift index. It measures changes over time in the number of job advertisements matching defined role searches. In plain terms, it answers a narrow question: what happened to the demand for your work.
It is not a forecast. It is a count of what employers already advertised for.
What it does not measure
SHIFT does not count people, hires, vacancies across the whole economy or salaries. It does not, by itself, explain why demand changed. Job advertisements are not jobs, and the index is read with that limit in mind.
Nor does it say anything about property. A shift in demand for a kind of work is not a statement about what a building is worth.
Edition 1
Edition 1 is dated September 2026. It covers 23 kinds of work and up to 24 markets, each page stating how many markets it could see. It compares two complete twelve-month periods: the 12 months to September 2024 and the 12 months to September 2026, with 4,998,127 and 9,619,119 advertisements respectively. Markets are not compared with one another.
Edition 1 is published as an open dataset under CC BY 4.0 on Zenodo, with a DOI, and with a separate methodology paper.
How to cite it
The suggested attribution is: SHIFT, Edition 1 (September 2026), shiftindex.org. The dataset DOI is 10.5281/zenodo.22346056. I set out the background in What is the SHIFT Index?
References
- SHIFT Labour Demand Index 2024–2026 (Edition 1), v1.0.0, Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22346056
- SHIFT methodology paper, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23133070
- shiftindex.org: About · Methodology · Cite · FAQ
- Guide: What is the SHIFT Index?
José Covas FRICS — about the author · ORCID 0009-0000-2298-0626