1. What the index measures

The Darscover Malta Rent Index reports asking rents: the advertised monthly price of residential rental listings published on darscover.com. It does not measure achieved rents, registered contract values, or renewals. Asking prices systematically differ from transacted prices, and nothing on these pages should be read as a measure of what tenants actually pay.

2. Sample source and its limits

The sample is the inventory advertised on Darscover, which is supplied overwhelmingly by a small number of letting agencies. In Q2 2026, the two largest sources supplied 100% of the 334 qualifying listings, across 2 sources in total. This is disclosed in every release because it is the single biggest limitation of the dataset: the index describes what these advertisers ask on this portal, not the Maltese rental market as a whole. Private landlord listings, other portals and unadvertised stock are not covered. As supply on the platform broadens, the per-quarter source-concentration figure will record it.

3. Quarter definition

A listing belongs to the quarter in which it was first advertised on the platform (its immutable creation timestamp, UTC calendar quarters). Because that timestamp never changes, any historical quarter can be recomputed at any time and will produce the same cohort. A quarter is published only after it ends; partial quarters are never reported. The earliest quarter is labelled a baseline: it contains the initial import of stock advertised before data collection began, so its level is not comparable and no movement is computed from it.

4. Inclusion rules

Residential category listings with a for-rent transaction type.
Listings that were publicly advertised (drafts and unpublished records are excluded).
Duplicates are counted once: where the same property is advertised by more than one agency, only the primary record enters the sample. Maltese agencies share stock heavily, and counting every copy would skew medians toward multi-listed properties.
Price-on-request listings are excluded (no usable price).
Fixed plausibility bounds: monthly rents below EUR 100 or above EUR 30,000 are treated as data-entry errors and excluded. The bounds are fixed rather than adaptive (no IQR trimming) so published numbers stay reproducible from this page alone. Medians and quartiles are otherwise robust to genuine tail values.
Listings flagged by quality moderation are excluded.

For Q2 2026 this meant 334 of 435 listings qualified (96 duplicates, 5 price on request, 0 outside bounds, 0 flagged).

5. Statistics and suppression

Reported statistics are the median and the 25th/75th percentiles (interpolated), with the listing count for every bucket.
Buckets are geography (national, region, locality, sub-locality) by property type by transaction type.
Any bucket with fewer than 10 qualifying listings is suppressed: its count is shown but its statistics are withheld. Where a narrow bucket is suppressed, the wider bucket (all property types, or the containing locality/region) is the correct figure to quote, described as such.
Quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year changes compare bucket medians and are only published when both quarters clear the floor.
Means are not published: with asking prices spanning several orders of magnitude, a mean is dominated by the tail (the national sale mean exceeds its median by roughly 80%), which is why all figures here are medians and quartiles.

6. What is deliberately not reported

Listing-level price cuts and rises. Not yet published. Our price-change history contained ingestion artefacts until July 2026 (a record was written on every feed run regardless of change); the data has since been cleaned and validated, and per-listing price-movement statistics may be added in a future release. This section will be updated when they are.
Achieved rents. Not observable from portal data.
Buckets below the sample floor, as above.

7. Data access and reuse

Each quarterly release is downloadable as CSV and JSON, including sample sizes and suppression flags (machine-readable latest release: JSON). Editorial and research reuse is free with attribution to “Darscover Malta Rent Index” and a link. Commercial licensing and API/MCP access for organisations: team@darscover.com.