Hello Data - Home

The Best Sources of Real Estate Data in 2023

· (9 minutes)
Article's Header

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are beginning to have a major impact on the real estate industry. Less than decade ago, real estate professionals had few options for leveraging predictive analytics technology, let alone securing quality real estate data. Now there are products to automatically extract data from documents, pull various property data sources together and even predict investment performance. These advancements have brought more investors into the market and made the industry more competitive than ever.

Access to high-quality data may be the most important factor for success in today’s competitive real estate investment market. It allows real estate professionals to understand the wants and needs of prospective residents, facilitates more accurate valuations, and leads to smarter investment decisions. By leveraging predictive analytics with quality data, real estate investors, developers and brokers can forecast demographic and economic changes, identify underserved markets, and optimize value-add and development strategies.

In 2023, there are so many sources of real estate data available that it can be hard to determine the best data providers for your needs. The team at Hello Data, Inc. has been working with demographic, economic, rent and property valuation data sources for many years, so we put together a list sources for real estate data that everyone in the industry should be familiar with. We break the data sources into four categories:

  1. Property Ownership & Assessor Data – These include data on the current owner of the property, what they pay in taxes, lot sizes, approved uses and building materials are characteristic of these sources.
  2. Commercial Real Estate Data – These sources include rent and transaction data on multifamily apartments, hotels, offices, retail and industrial properties. Attributes such as building size, rent per sqft, last sale price and current tenants and lease terms are typical from these sources.
  3. Single-Family Housing Data – These data sources provide detail on listing and sales prices and trends, absorption rates, listing descriptions, floorplans and tons of property photos.
  4. Demographic & Economic Data Sources – Includes data aggregated from sources like the U.S. Census and American Community Survey, as well as proprietary data from surveys of local business owners and field research.

In the sections below, we’ll describe the top sources in each category and provide an overview of what each source offers.

Best Sources for Property Ownership & Tax Assessor Data

CoreLogic

CoreLogic is the leading provider of quality housing data in the U.S., covering more than 99.99% of all properties. It includes detail about both securitized and non-securitized properties, and provides assessor, tax and recorder data, as well as parcel outlines for GIS mapping. The company’s databases provide valuable market intelligence and include the “Homeowner Equity Report” and a “US Home Price Insights” report.

Black Knight

Another leader in data and analytics, Black Knight provides the “Monthly Mortgage Monitor” report that offers real estate professionals valuable insight into the housing market. Their “Originations Market Monitor” report provides additional data on average credit scores and market rate indices.

First American Data Tree

First American Data Tree LLC provides property data and document images to mortgage and real estate-related businesses. The company searches, discovers, and shares the property-centric information contained in public records, recorded documents, title plants, and other robust data sources.

ATTOM

Attom provides robust real estate data, foreclosure, boundary, listings data and more for over 155 million residential and commercial properties throughout the U.S. It offers a comprehensive solution including neighborhood data, property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, listings, boundaries, natural hazards, school, and environmental risks.

Estated

Estated provides data on more than 150 million residential properties across the U.S. This data includes parcel and building information, valuations, deed and tax assessments, and homeownership history. For ease of integration and flexibility, this data can be delivered via bulk or API exports.

Best Sources for Commercial Real Estate Data

CoStar

CoStar is the leading commercial real estate data provider in the US with a vast database of information, including sales and lease comps, listings, vacancies, rents, tenants, ownership, and market trends. It offers access to 390 markets and 2,700 submarkets, with custom analytics for specific commercial property data sets, such as geography, building class, and sales information.

Moody’s Analytics

A product of Moody’s acquisition of Reis, Moody’s Analytics provides insight into major US commercial real estate markets through proprietary data and advanced analytics. It allows users to view real estate data at the property, submarket, and market-level, and includes a searchable database for real-time reporting.

CompStak

CompStak was the first crowdsourced commercial real estate database. It collects verified and standardized comps from professionals in leading brokerages and appraisal firms. It offers powerful analytics and high data integrity, offering contributors incentives for updating and correcting comp data. CompStak is a good source for comp data that can’t be found anywhere else.

Real Capital Analytics (RCA)

RCA focuses on providing ongoing deals, historical information, and market analytics. It also offers insightful market information about key players, transactions, and investors, and provides in-depth analysis of market transactions and enables users to uncover property owners, attributes, and debt terms. It was recently acquired by MSCI for $950M in cash, which should tell you a bit about the quality of its data!

CREXi

CREXi’s goal is to streamline the entire real estate transaction process online. It recently launched CREXi Intelligence, an extensive database subscription that offers powerful mapping tools, allowing users to view population, median income, traffic count, and points of interest data on top of listings and comps for more in-depth analysis.

Reonomy

Reonomy is a CRE data provider that utilizes AI and machine learning to identify property opportunities. It gathers data from a wide range of resources to evaluate deals and market potential, displaying up to 100 data points for any given asset, such as renovation details, sales history, and comps. There are approximately 50 million commercial properties listed on Reonomy’s platform.

Best Sources for Single-Family Housing Data

Realtor.com

The realtor.com real estate data library is available for free to real estate professionals and provides structured data for database use. The information includes metrics for various geographic locations down to the zip code level, based on the most comprehensive and accurate MLS-listed for-sale home databases in the industry. Realtor.com aggregates and analyzes data from various sources to produce reliable and comparable market figures and trends.

National Association of Realtors (NAR)

NAR is a reliable source of housing statistics and data, including national, regional, and metro-market level information. It produces data-backed reports and surveys on topics such as housing affordability, pending home sales, and buyer and seller profiles, and presents the information in an easily digestible format.

National Association of Homebuilders (NAHB)

NAHB provides insights into the housing market by compiling popular regional and local tables, such as permit data, employment information, and new and existing homes sold by region. It offers “Housing Economics”, a free publication, and “Housing Economics PLUS”, a subscription-based service, to provide comprehensive historical and current statistics, including housing stats, homes sold by region, and new construction value.

Zillow

Zillow is a great free resource for single-family housing data. Its Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI) is a useful tool for real estate professionals to track market changes across regions and housing types. Zillow publishes the ZHVI for single-family residences, condos/coops, and homes with 1-5+ bedrooms, and it is optimized for timeliness, comprehensiveness, and visibility.

Fannie Mae

As a leading provider of mortgage financing, Fannie Mae is a trusted source of data in the real estate industry. In September, the company’s Economic & Strategic Research Group launched the Fannie Mae Home Purchase Sentiment Index (HPSI) to provide signals about the direction of the housing market and help professionals and investors make informed decisions.

Best Sources for Demographic & Economic Data

American Community Survey (ACS)

The ACS is an ongoing survey providing socioeconomic data for states, counties, and other jurisdictions and creates period estimates, which represent characteristics of the population and housing over a specific period of data collection. 1-year ACS estimates provide 12 months of collected data for areas with populations of 65,000 or more, 3-year ACS estimates provide 36 months of data for areas with populations of 20,000 or more, and five-year estimates provide 60 months of collected data for all areas.

Census Data

Data.Census.Gov (previously American Fact Finder) provides basic data on population, housing, economic, and geographic information in the form of tables and maps for the United States, states, counties, cities, towns, American Indian reservations, Puerto Rico, and the island areas. Community Facts offers tables or maps of such information for states and counties, and cities, towns, or zip codes of sufficient size to make reasonably reliable estimates.

Consumer Expenditure Survey

The Consumer Expenditure Survey provides data on expenditures, income, and demographic characteristics of consumers in the United States in tables, databases, news releases, reports, and public-use microdata files. Published tables provide Consumer Expenditure Survey data by classifications that include income quintile, income decile, income class, age of reference person, size of consumer unit, number of earners, composition of consumer unit, region of residence, housing tenure, type of area (urban-rural), race, Hispanic origin, occupation, and highest education level of any member.

City-Data.com

By collecting and analyzing data from a combination of government and private sources, City-Data.com produces detailed, informative profiles for every city in the US. Whether it’s crime rates or weather patterns, City-Data.com helps real estate professionals narrow in on a variety of factors on a state-by-state level. The site’s interactive data map also helps industry professionals visualize the data they are looking at. Users can target the state, city, county or region they’re in and get the data they need.

How Hello Data Can Help With Your Real Estate Data Processing Needs

Hello Data was founded by a passionate team of data scientists and engineers with proven real estate domain expertise to help PropTech companies build data driven products. We’ve built real estate data data pipelines, predictive algorithms and workflow automation technology for startups, publicly traded companies, and everything in between.

Our suite of APIs helps real estate professionals and software providers extract data from real estate documents and websites, bolster it with supplemental sources, and use it for prediction and workflow automation. Learn more about how Hello Data helps extract, enrich and predict with real estate data from the resources below:

See how Hello Data can help your business