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Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data

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  • Boeing, Geoff

    (Northeastern University)

  • Wegmann, Jake
  • Jiao, Junfeng

Abstract

Traditional US rental housing data sources such as the American Community Survey and the American Housing Survey report on the transacted market—what existing renters pay each month. They do not explicitly tell us about the spot market—i.e., the asking rents that current homeseekers must pay to acquire housing—though they are routinely used as a proxy. This study compares governmental data to millions of contemporaneous rental listings and finds that asking rents diverge substantially from these most recent estimates. Conventional housing data understate current market conditions and affordability challenges, especially in cities with tight and expensive rental markets.

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  • Boeing, Geoff & Wegmann, Jake & Jiao, Junfeng, 2020. "Rental Housing Spot Markets: How Online Information Exchanges Can Supplement Transacted-Rents Data," SocArXiv phgqt, Center for Open Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:phgqt
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/phgqt
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    1. Albert Saiz, 2010. "The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 125(3), pages 1253-1296.
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    Cited by:

    1. Boeing, Geoff & Harten, Julia & Sanchez-Moyano, Rocio, 2023. "Digitalization of the Housing Search: Homeseekers, Gatekeepers, and Market Legibility," SocArXiv 643x2, Center for Open Science.
    2. Geoff Boeing, 2020. "Online rental housing market representation and the digital reproduction of urban inequality," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 52(2), pages 449-468, March.
    3. Geoff Boeing & Max Besbris & Ariela Schachter & John Kuk, 2021. "Housing Search in the Age of Big Data: Smarter Cities or the Same Old Blind Spots?," Housing Policy Debate, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(1), pages 112-126, January.
    4. Pereira, Mauro F. & Vale, David S. & Santana, Paula, 2023. "Is walkability equitably distributed across socio-economic groups? – A spatial analysis for Lisbon metropolitan area," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 106(C).
    5. Preis, Benjamin, 2024. "Is This a Rental? Comparing Methods for Identifying Rental Units," OSF Preprints afzdx, Center for Open Science.
    6. Chris Hess & Arthur Acolin & Rebecca Walter & Ian Kennedy & Sarah Chasins & Kyle Crowder, 2021. "Searching for housing in the digital age: Neighborhood representation on internet rental housing platforms across space, platform, and metropolitan segregation," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 53(8), pages 2012-2032, November.

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