Chosen theme: The Role of Real Estate Data in Economic Forecasting. Explore how housing prices, rents, inventory, and permits help us anticipate growth, inflation, and employment. Read on, share your insights, and subscribe to stay ahead of the next turn in the cycle.
Listings can contain duplicates, outdated statuses, and inconsistent fields. Rigorous standardization, fuzzy matching, and status reconciliation prevent false signals. A single misclassified sale can skew neighborhood medians. We document every rule, test drift weekly, and invite you to suggest edge cases you’ve encountered.
From Raw Listings to Forecast-Ready Features
Median prices can mislead when the mix shifts toward larger homes. Hedonic models adjust for bedrooms, lot size, age, and location, producing truer price trends. In one city, the median jumped despite flat hedonic prices. That nuance changed an inflation call. Want a primer? Subscribe for our upcoming guide.
From Raw Listings to Forecast-Ready Features
Causality, Correlation, and Model Craft
We test whether rents, prices, or permits systematically precede movements in consumption, employment, or inflation using Granger causality, cross-correlation, and rolling windows. Stability matters: lead times drift across cycles. Tell us which indicators you trust when the usual relationships break.
Field Notes: Stories Where Housing Led the Economy
Before the Great Recession, rising days on market and swelling inventories appeared months before broader employment declines. Appraisers reported price cuts spreading block by block. Those micro tremors became macro quakes. If you lived through that shift, share what you saw first and what you missed.
As offices emptied, downtown rents softened while suburban and small-city markets tightened. Search interest, lease renewals, and single-family rents told the story early. Economists adjusted population assumptions mid-forecast. Did your neighborhood experience a similar pivot? Tell us how it reshaped local businesses and services.
A rapid rate spike crushed affordability, cooled bidding wars, and thinned first-time buyer pools. Pending sales slowed before employment data budged, signaling a broader deceleration. Lenders tightened standards. We tracked the shift in real time. Want the affordability dashboard? Subscribe and receive the template by email.
Policy and Business Decisions Powered by Property Data
Shelter inflation is sticky and lagged. High-frequency rent measures help anticipate CPI shelter components, shaping rate paths. During a recent plateau, our rent index signaled relief earlier than official prints. If you track alternative measures, share your favorites and how you calibrate them.
Engage, Explore, and Co-Create Better Forecasts
Tell us what you are seeing: new for-sale signs, construction pauses, rent concessions, or bidding wars returning. Ground truth sharpens indicators. We will feature selected community notes in our next post with attribution, so join the conversation and help refine the story.
Engage, Explore, and Co-Create Better Forecasts
Get concise updates on prices, rents, inventory, and permits every Friday, plus our latest economic interpretation. We keep it actionable and transparent, with charts you can reuse. Subscribe today, and reply to the welcome email with topics you want us to analyze next.