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Residential Real Estate Data for Urban Economics Research
Deeds, assessments, listings and permits record the housing market as it transacts: what sold, for how much, who the buyer was, and what a landlord was asking for the unit next door. That gives urban economists a parcel level panel refreshed within weeks, where the American Community Survey reports self reported values as five year averages and public price indices arrive as metropolitan aggregates. Ownership fields make it possible to separate owner occupiers from LLCs, trusts and institutional buyers, and permit records show supply responding to a zoning or tax change well before the units are occupied. The limitation is that listings carry asking rather than contract terms, and coverage depends on which counties release records and how quickly.
How urban economists use residential real estate data
Housing supply, zoning and the permitting margin
Supply side work compares parcels across a regulatory boundary, a zoning change or a tax threshold and asks whether construction responds, using permit records as the outcome because a permit registers a decision to build months before a unit enters occupancy statistics. The identifying variation usually comes from parcel level land use and assessment fields joined to the permit, so the design stands or falls on the quality of that match. Permits record intent rather than completion, and projects that stall or are abandoned remain in the data as though they were built.
Rental affordability and displacement
Rent research increasingly leans on listing level asking rents, which update weekly and cover markets no survey samples at that frequency, to track how rents in a neighbourhood move after a building changes hands, a policy takes effect or a disaster removes stock. The measure is an asking rent on a vacant unit rather than the contract rent paid by a sitting tenant, so it moves earlier and further than the rent burden households actually experience. Listings also skew toward the professionally managed market and miss informal and subsidised units, which is where the affordability question is often sharpest.
Ownership, investors and housing wealth
Because deed and assessment records name the buyer, researchers can separate owner occupiers from LLCs, trusts and institutional purchasers, then trace how ownership composition in a tract shifts after a change in credit conditions, prices or the availability of the records themselves. Entity names have to be cleaned and linked before they carry meaning, and a single investor operating through dozens of shell entities will look like dozens of small buyers until that work is done. Recorded prices also omit the terms of the deal, so cash purchases, portfolio sales and intrafamily transfers can enter a price panel as ordinary arm's length transactions.
Residential real estate datasets available on Dewey
ATTOM
ATTOM's residential property records, the layer urban economists build parcel level price, transaction and ownership panels from when metropolitan indices are too coarse for the question.
View datasetRentHub
RentHub's US residential real estate data, for questions that turn on asking rents and listing activity between survey releases rather than on the contract rents reported in the American Community Survey.
View datasetConstruction Monitor
Construction Monitor's permit data, which registers new residential supply at the point a jurisdiction approves it, months before those units appear in occupancy or housing stock statistics.
View datasetMore published work using residential real estate data
Yingru Pan · Thesis/Dissertation · 2026
Lindsey Raymond · thesis · 2026
Gabriella Carmona, Dr. Vinit Mukhija, Rodrigo Dominguez Villegas, Mariah Bonilla, Sofia Barajas, Xalma Palomino, Ana Guadalupe Lua Martel · NA - Latino Policy & Politics Institute Website · 2026
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