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US Rental Data for Urban Economics Research
US rental data for urban economics research. Established applications, the datasets Dewey carries, and published work using them.
How urban economists use US rental data
Rent gradients and neighbourhood change
Urban economists use listing level asking rents to trace how prices vary within a metro and how they move as neighbourhoods turn over, regressing rent per unit or per square foot on distance to employment centres, transit and local amenities. Listings record what a unit is advertised at rather than what a tenant signs, and units that never reach an open market are absent entirely, so the panel skews toward the more mobile end of the stock. Joining listings to block group demographics keeps the composition of the surrounding population in the model rather than in the error term.
Housing supply, zoning and the rent response
A common design compares rents before and after a zoning change, a permitting reform or a tax that falls on development, using rental listings as the outcome and an adjacent jurisdiction as the control. The identifying assumption is that listing composition is stable on both sides of the boundary, which fails when a reform changes the mix of units that come to market, so estimates condition on bedrooms, floor area and building age rather than comparing raw medians.
Affordability, displacement and shocks to the rental stock
After a fire, a flood or a sudden loss of units, urban economists track asking rents in the affected area and in a ring around it to measure how fast the market reprices and which households are priced out, pairing rents with renter incomes so the outcome is rent burden rather than rent alone. Listings observe only the units that are advertised, so a market where displaced tenants are absorbed informally through doubling up or private arrangements will look tighter than it is, and the estimated disruption is a lower bound.
US rental datasets available on Dewey
Dwellsy
US rental listings from Dwellsy, giving urban economists an asking rent measure at the level of the individual unit rather than a survey aggregate.
View datasetRentHub
RentHub's US residential real estate records, used to set asking rents alongside the properties and neighbourhoods they sit in.
View datasetATTOM
Property level residential records from ATTOM, which urban economists join to rental listings when a question needs the owner occupied side of the same housing market.
View datasetMore published work using US rental data
Yingru Pan · Thesis/Dissertation · 2026
Zenan Zhou, Elliot Rabinovich, Karen Donahue · working paper · 2026
Sooyoung Lim, Zhenlong Li, Ruixiang Liu · Computational Urban Science · 2026
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