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Ask HN: Definitive source for real estate statistics?

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I am considering buying a house or multi family property here in CA and would like to know what sources for real estate statistics you are all using, and what your thoughts are on what the best, unbiased sources are to do your homework? I do not want to rely on what realtors say as they always say "the market is going up" and "pay cash over asking price".

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As a real estate appraiser, I applaud you trying to do research instead of just relying on what realtors say. To answer your question up front, find a realtor friend who will allow you to use their access to your local Multiple Listing System (MLS).

Specifically, if you can find someone to help you with this, have them show you a Statistical Market Conditions report for a full year from the day you’re gathering this info (known in industry as a 1004MC. They can easily create this in most MLS software like FlexMLS). The trick is defining the amount of house (sq footage), the lot size (your prerogative on space), and any other features you deem important to your new home, along with being specific to the area you want to live in (a MC report over a whole city will not give the granular detail you might be looking for).

Since it is a part of most appraisal assignments , I use this constantly to make sure that my head is in the game when it comes to what has actually sold in the market for the type of house I’m appraising, as well as seeing what people choose to list for. The top of the page usually has a table with headings that look like:

[12-7 months ago][6-4 months ago][3 months ago - current]

The items in the table go over amount of listed and sold properties, as well as the days on market, along with median statistics. Super useful to get a feel of what has actually happened, not what people want to happen.

The issue for those who do not work in the real estate field is that you do not have access to all the data we have, and it is a shame because people should be able to make well informed decisions on their own rather than getting advice from someone who stands to gain monetarily from the transaction you are making.

The other thing that rubs me the wrong way when I hear people looking to Zillow, Opendoor, or any of the other iBuying firms for what their house is “actually worth” they do not realize that all these companies are doing is scrapping or has their own access to local MLS systems and layering their own pricing models over the data that is already there. I used to work as part of an internal team at one of these places before I kept into the family business, and I know that we were not the only company doing so to get people to use our platform.

Ultimately, my advice is if you can get your hands on access to one of these systems, because MOST data on these multiple listing services is regulated to make sure realtors don’t lie about their listings, and is usually tied into your state’s assessors info (especially if you are in an open data state).

>find a realtor friend who will allow you to use their access to your local Multiple Listing System (MLS).

Some states anyone can access it, here in Indiana MIBOR lets you see Indiana MLS listings https://property.mibor.com/search

and, good grief... there are a lot of multi-million dollar homes here apparently.

I wrote code to access one California MLS, and learned a lot about it in the process. I learned that at every level, information is hidden and obfuscated! While I was involved, a National MLS association in Chicago was taken to court over its practices and lost. Many MLS are slightly different. With all that said, I am glad its not completely standardized, or worse Federally administered, overall (why? exercise for the reader)

Very true, and not all of the data we pull in our practice will give you everything on a house. It’s up to the Technical admins that implement, but I am unsure of how much is just set up as they bought it or working with a team to implement certain features.

I understand the wont for not having a completely standardized system or federally administered system here in the states; But in my own experience in my state, it would make work a lot easier in outlying areas where an MLS is owned by one realty group that does not make it easy for outsiders to use, even though we do regular work in that area.

There certainly could be a push in the US to have a national standard to hold MLSs to, as most loans are federally backed or are set up in such a way to be sold in secondary markets that could be bought by government backed entities. There has also been talk among lenders and those in the risk management space of real estate for more normalized data, to make it easier for things to be portable or more ready to feed into an automated value model.

My company, Trusty, is designed to bring transparency and unbiased opinions to real estate. Our tagline is "real estate made real" through crowdsourced insights and some refer to us as a "Social Zillow" since we encourage conversation about specific homes, neighborhoods, and the market in general. All of this community content creates a Wikipedia-style database that rivals the long-standing MLS monopoly as the source of truth for housing information, both on and off-market.

We're disrupting residential real estate in 3 key ways:

1) More transparency Trusty is like a "Yelp for real estate" where the community rates, reviews, adds price estimates and other user-generated content to houses.

2) More data Through UGC, we’re building a Wikipedia-style database that is evergreen and houses both quantitative and qualitative data, the latter of which has never been available through the MLS or any other real estate portal.

3) More options With all our user commentary and data, people can discover and make pre-emptive offers on any home, whether it’s for sale or not.

We launched in California and have UGC on 3,000+ properties in NorCal with an emphasis on Sacramento and Marin County. But our community covers 90% of the state of CA so feel free to login and ask questions about any property you find and someone will likely chime in with their opinion.

https://trustyco.com/

Since it sounds like you have some specific needs, I'd be happy to connect 1:1 to see how we may be able to assist with your real estate endeavors. Our passion is helping people just like you find the unbiased truth when it comes to real estate. That's why we named the company Trusty. Reach out anytime.

Tim -- Tim Hyer Co-founder and CEO | Trusty tim@trustyco.com https://trustyco.com/

Hey Tim,

If I can, I’d like to ask a few questions here, in the name of transparency and as someone whose license is predicated on “unbiased opinions”:

1. How does a “social Zillow” engender trust if anyone can post an opinion on a property? What stops bad actors from “review bombing” a listing on your platform?

2.What exactly are you disrupting? While I am with you that more people should have access to these systems, they are still run locally by the realtors that are putting their own listings on, and are held to certain standards of data reliability under penalty of being booted off these systems. Can the same be said for those that submit bad data to your platform?

3. Do homeowners get a say in not receiving these offers when they aren’t selling? It certainly sounds like it would be adding more spam sent to homeowners that do not need it, but I would love to be educated on why that wouldn’t be the case.

4. What value are you as a company extracting from crowdsourcing this data on the homes in your platform? Will you be taking a cut from offers made, or is this more of a way to connect interested parties?

5. I see all these buzzwords trying to connect a cohesive story to spin your product, but how is your platform providing value to end users, especially if you are touting it as a Wikipedia-style database?

I like this concept. Finding and assessing agents stinks. I've spent a bunch of time looking at places in the Truckee, CA area. Finding the good agent was the hardest part - I wish I had been able to look at their opinions on places, and how they compared to the consensus.

Care less about the social features with random people. But I suppose I do care about yelp reviews, and trip advisor reviews... so maybe my thinking is flawed.

A couple I can suggest:

1) https://www.tophap.com/

2) https://www.airdna.co/

Or, if you want to hack some code:

3) http://insideairbnb.com/get-the-data.html

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has a lot of good data:

https://www.fhfa.gov/DataTools/Downloads/Pages/House-Price-I...

The Five Digit Zip Codes developmental indices give good information about local-market performance across multiple cycles.

If we're talking about definitive, authoritative sources, then it's got to be MLS, right?

^Yes a million times yes

I've been scraping several real estate sites for years (not sure why exactly) and have millions of listings in bigquery. Could probably pull specific stats for you if you can give a bit more detail on what you're looking for.

An interesting metric would be the list price vs the actual price. In the past my perception is the sale price was maybe 95% of the list price. Now, the "perception" is the sale price is greater than 100% of the list price.

I recommend www.vestmap.com - I use it daily to evaluate property locations.

The site just gives you the raw accurate data you need - no hand waving “ai” nonsense.

You should disclaim that you're the creator

Yikes.

I’m all about sharing projects on HN, but that seems like a big oversight. :(

Check out Trusty! My brother has been using it in Mill Valley and says it's great!

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