Rental Housing Spot Markets How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data

Document pages: 23 pages

Abstract: Traditional US rental housing data sources such as the American CommunitySurvey and the American Housing Survey report on the transacted market - whatexisting renters pay each month. They do not explicitly tell us about the spotmarket - i.e., the asking rents that current homeseekers must pay to acquirehousing - though they are routinely used as a proxy. This study comparesgovernmental data to millions of contemporaneous rental listings and finds thatasking rents diverge substantially from these most recent estimates.Conventional housing data understate current market conditions andaffordability challenges, especially in cities with tight and expensive rentalmarkets.