Rental Property Data

What Is Rental Property Data?

Rental data encompasses all information about rentals in a given geographical area. This data contains comparisons to other areas, years, to local income, and to house prices in the same geographical area. 

Where Does Rental Property Data Come From?

Sources of rental property data may be private, public, or governmental. Private sources include real estate brokers, real estate data vendors, and geo-spatial data vendors. Public sources include online forums and websites as well as local HMO records and reviews for schools or commercial establishments. Government sources of this data include the census, geologic maps, lists of foreclosures and repossessions, property deeds, and building permits. 

Taken together, all these sources provide information on the health of a property as well as the character and economic level of a neighborhood, which all affect rental properties. 

What Types of Columns/Attributes Should I Expect When Working with This Data?

This data lends itself to tables and maps as well as bar and line graphs. In every representation of the data, however, the area remains the prime feature, whether bounded by a postal code, a county, or any other marker. Likewise, rental prices in an area are nearly always included. 

Other common attributes are comparisons: to housing prices in the same area, to different neighborhoods, to different countries, to average local income, to past years or quarters.

Additional attributes include property, property features, neighborhood points of interest, demographics and crime rates, and environmental dangers. 

What Is This Data Used For? 

Renters use this data to find properties to rent that suit their lifestyles and needs. Real estate agents use it to market properties, to set prices, and to make investment decisions. Agents and agencies can also conduct market or competitor research. 

Finally, researchers use the data to track economic trends in an area, an industry, or a demographic. 

How Should I Test the Quality of Rental Property Data?

You can generally rely on government-generated rental property sources without much concern. Likewise, the real estate data vendors for review on our site provide excellent information. 

To be sure that you have quality data, make sure that it is not sourced from information about properties that are currently on the market but that the entire rental stock in a given area is included. 

Additionally, make sure to standardize addresses from all your sources and confirm the owner and renter details to ensure the accuracy of your deeds and building permits  data. 

And, as always, make sure your dataset is regularly updated and cleansed. 

Interesting Case Studies and Blogs to Look Into

OECD Housing Prices Dataset

Deloitte: Property Index 2019

Global Property Guide: Rental Yields Compared

Tangible Examples of Impact

“Foreclosure activity has, for all intents and purposes, ground to a halt due to moratoria put in place by the federal, state and local governments and the mortgage forbearance program initiated by the CARES Act,” said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of RealtyTrac, an ATTOM Data company. “But it’s important to remember that the numbers we’re seeing today are artificially low, even as the number of seriously delinquent loans continues to increase, and that we’ll see a significant – and probably quite sudden – burst of foreclosure activity once these various government programs expire.”

—Attom Data: Q3 2020 US Foreclosure Activity at Historic Lows

Rent was down the most year-over-year in September in some of the nation’s priciest rental markets, falling 6% in New York, 5.9% in San Francisco and 4.5% in San Jose. Meanwhile, rents were up strongly year-over-year across much of the Midwest and Sun Belt, with the biggest annual gains among large markets recorded in Memphis (8.7%), Phoenix (7%) and Riverside (6.9%). 

—Zillow: September 2020 Market Report & Weekly Market Data (Through Oct. 10)