US rental data

What is Dwellsy?

Dwellsy IQ is a rental data company that pulls first-party listings directly from the property management systems where operators set rents, fill units, and update availability. The feed spans more than 25,000 property managers through 30+ PMS integrations, not scraped consumer sites, not government surveys, not third party aggregators. That sourcing is what makes Dwellsy different from almost every other rental dataset academic researchers have worked with.

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What academic researchers should know about Dwellsy rental listings data

The dataset covers more than 17 million U.S. rental listings since 2020, spanning both multifamily and single family units across 16,000 ZIP codes and 800 MSAs, which works out to roughly 70 percent of professionally managed U.S. rental housing. Dwellsy delivers at the ZIP and unit level with regular refreshes on Dewey, so researchers can follow actual listing activity as it moves through the market rather than waiting on quarterly or annual aggregates. Every record runs through deduplication, validation, normalization, and fraud checks before it lands in the dataset.

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Why academic researchers choose Dwellsy on Dewey

Rental housing research has historically been stuck choosing between scraped listing aggregators, which overcount some property types and miss others, and government surveys, which give you snapshots but not continuous market dynamics. Dwellsy replaces both. The data comes straight from the systems property managers use to set rents and fill units, so it reflects what is actually on the market at the ZIP and unit level, week by week, with a consistent schema back to 2020. That kind of granular, first party rental panel has not existed for academics before, and it pairs naturally with ATTOM parcel records, Advan mobility patterns, and ClimateCheck hazard ratings to support multidisciplinary housing studies on the Dewey Platform.

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Dwellsy academic research ideas and use cases

• ‍Housing affordability and rent burden. Rent growth is one of the most politically urgent questions in U.S. housing economics, and most published estimates still lean on CPI components, Zillow indexes, or government surveys that lag the market by months. With Dwellsy, researchers can measure rent changes at the ZIP level, week by week, from 2020 forward, and connect those dynamics to income, demographics, and local policy shifts drawn from Census or IRS data.‍
• Disaster and displacement shocks. Rental markets respond fast to fires, floods, and storms, and the data has historically been too thin to catch the adjustment period. UCLA researchers are already using Dwellsy to study how rents moved across Los Angeles neighborhoods after the Southern California wildfires, and the same design extends naturally to hurricane landfalls, flooding events, and heat emergencies.‍
• Multifamily versus single family rentals. The institutionalization of single family rental housing is a live debate in real estate finance and urban economics, and Dwellsy is one of the only datasets that carries both multifamily and SFR listings in a single schema. That makes it straightforward to compare price dynamics, vacancy patterns, and operator concentration across product types in the same market.‍
• Rent control, zoning, and housing policy evaluation. Policy reforms call for quasi experimental designs, and those designs need listing level data that covers the window before and after the intervention. Dwellsy's historical depth back to 2020 supports difference in differences, synthetic control, and event study work around rent stabilization laws, ADU reforms, upzoning, and LIHTC deployment.‍
• Climate exposure and housing markets. Pairing Dwellsy with ClimateCheck or ATTOM parcel records lets researchers study whether rent pricing is starting to capitalize flood, fire, and heat risk, and how that capitalization varies across regions, insurance regimes, and property types.‍
• Migration and the remote work reshuffling. Remote work changed where Americans rent, and whether those moves are sticky is still an open question. Dwellsy's multiyear panel across 800 MSAs supports research on interregional migration, exurban growth, and the rebalancing of coastal and inland rental markets.

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Dive deeper with Dewey documentation

Detailed information on onboarding with Dewey, data partner details, and technical documentation on data access.

View documentation

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