Definitive source for real estate statistics?

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).

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/

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?

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.

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.

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