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Residential Real Estate Data for Housing Policy Research
Deeds, assessor rolls and rental listings record who owns each parcel, what it last sold for, and what it is currently being advertised at, updated continuously rather than once a decade. That grain lets researchers watch an LLC buy forty houses in one census tract, or an asking rent move months before a household survey would register it, neither of which is visible in the tenure and gross rent tables of the American Community Survey. Sale prices and listing rents are also the two prices most housing policy acts on directly, so transfer taxes, zoning reform, rent regulation and eviction diversion can be evaluated against the outcome they target rather than a modelled index. Listings capture asking rents rather than contract rents, and assessor coverage and update frequency vary county by county, which shapes what any of these designs can claim.
How housing policy researchers use residential real estate data
Housing supply, zoning and permitting constraints
Parcel level assessor and deed records let researchers hold land, existing structure and ownership constant while comparing what actually gets built across jurisdictions with different zoning and permitting regimes, often along municipal boundaries where near identical parcels face different rules. The outcome is usually a change on the tax roll: a subdivision, a teardown, an added unit, or a jump in improvement value, dated by the assessment cycle rather than by the day construction started. That timing is the constraint, since counties reassess on different schedules and differ in what counts as a reportable change, so a supply response measured this way is dated to within a year at best.
Investor purchases in the single family rental market
Deed records name the buyer, which lets researchers classify purchases by entity type, measure how concentrated ownership becomes in a tract after a wave of acquisitions, and then follow the same parcels into later listing rents or resale prices. The design typically compares tracts with similar pre period price trajectories but different investor exposure, with the buyer name string doing the work of identifying an institution. Entity names are messy, because subsidiaries, trusts and shell LLCs sit between a parcel and its beneficial owner, so any measure of institutional share is a lower bound and the largest holders generally have to be reconciled by hand.
Rents, affordability and displacement pressure
Listing level rental data gives a monthly series of asking rents by unit and bedroom count, fine enough to study how a rent stabilisation ordinance, a new subsidy, or a post disaster shock moves the bottom of a local market rather than its median. Because listings are advertised prices for vacant units, they miss what sitting tenants pay and over represent the part of the stock that turns over, so they measure the rent a mover faces and should be read that way. Joining them to transaction records on the same buildings separates rent movements that follow a change of owner from those that follow a change in market conditions.
Residential real estate datasets available on Dewey
ATTOM
Deed transfers, assessor records, mortgage and foreclosure filings for residential parcels across the US, the base layer for any housing policy design that needs to know who owns a property, what they paid for it, and when it changed hands.
View datasetRentHub
US residential real estate listings with prices and unit characteristics, useful for tracking how a local market moves between survey waves rather than waiting on annual published estimates.
View datasetDwellsy
US rental listings with asking rent, unit detail and location, giving housing policy researchers a read on the vacant end of the rental stock that census sources report only as annual gross rent aggregates.
View datasetMore published work using residential real estate data
Yingru Pan · Thesis/Dissertation · 2026
Taesoo Song, Carolina Reid · Journal of the American Planning Association · 2026
Buenaventura, Maya, Heaton, Paul · Fordham Urban Law Journal · 2025
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