US rental data

What is Dwellsy?

Dwellsy IQ pulls rental data directly from the property management systems where operators set rents, fill units, and update availability, spanning more than 25,000 property managers rather than scraped listings or government surveys. That same first party sourcing now runs through two products on Dewey: TotalIQ, the raw listing panel, and TrendsIQ, precomputed rent trend indices for ZIP codes, cities, and metro areas.

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What academic researchers should know about Dwellsy rental listings data

TotalIQ covers more than 17 million U.S. rental listings since 2020, spanning multifamily and single family units across 16,000 ZIP codes and 800 metro areas, with 250 or more standardized attributes per listing and regular refreshes on Dewey. TrendsIQ takes that same first party panel and turns it into monthly median rent and year over year rate of change figures at the ZIP, city, and metro level, so researchers who want the market view do not have to build an aggregation pipeline themselves. Each ZIP's contribution to a city or metro figure is weighted by verified rental inventory and Census renter occupancy rather than by how many listings happened to post that month, and rents are tracked separately across six strata by property type and bedroom count. A rolling three month smoothing window, with machine learning models extending coverage into data sparse markets, keeps the index responsive without amplifying single month noise.

Why academic researchers choose Dwellsy on Dewey

Rental housing research has historically meant choosing between scraped listing aggregators, which overcount some property types and miss others, and government surveys, which offer snapshots but not continuous market dynamics. Dwellsy replaces both starting points. TotalIQ gives researchers the underlying listing panel at the unit level for panel and event study designs, while TrendsIQ gives them a market level index weighted by actual rental inventory rather than listing volume, a meaningful upgrade over indices that treat every ZIP code the same regardless of size. That range, from raw listings to aggregated trends, pairs naturally with ATTOM parcel and foreclosure records, Advan Research foot traffic patterns, LinkUp job postings, and ConsumerEdge transaction data to support multidisciplinary housing studies on Dewey.

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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 TrendsIQ, researchers can measure rent changes at the ZIP, city, or metro level and connect that movement to income, demographics, and local policy shifts drawn from Census or IRS data, without waiting on quarterly aggregates or building their own weighting scheme.‍
• 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. TotalIQ's listing history back to 2020 and TrendsIQ's monthly index support difference in differences, synthetic control, and event study work around rent stabilization laws, ADU reforms, upzoning, and other local housing policy changes.‍
• 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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