UNDER EMBARGO UNTIL WEDNESDAY 7/26/2017 AT 7:00AM EDT As America’s cities continue to grow and add jobs, it’s crucial that sufficient new housing is built to meet the demand created by that growth. Analyzing data on building permits and employment, Apartment List found that only 10 of the nation’s 50 largest metros have produced enough new housing to keep pace with job growth in recent years. San Francisco, for example, added 3.0 jobs for every new housing unit permitted from 2005 to 2010, with an even more severe undersupply of 6.8 jobs per unit in the post-recession period
Methodology Updates Apartment List is committed to making our rent estimates the best and most accurate available, and as part of our efforts toward that goal, we've recently made some changes to our methodology. Data from private listing sites, including our own, tends to skew towards luxury apartments, introducing sample bias. In order to address these limitations, our estimates now start with reliable median rent statistics from the Census Bureau, which we then extrapolate forward to the current month using a growth rate calculated from our listing data. In calculating that growth rate, we use a same-unit analysis similar to Case-Shiller’s approach,
Methodology Updates Apartment List is committed to making our rent estimates the best and most accurate available, and as part of our efforts toward that goal, we've recently made some changes to our methodology. Data from private listing sites, including our own, tends to skew towards luxury apartments, introducing sample bias. In order to address these limitations, our estimates now start with reliable median rent statistics from the Census Bureau, which we then extrapolate forward to the current month using a growth rate calculated from our listing data. In calculating that growth rate, we use a same-unit analysis similar to Case-Shiller’s approach,
Apartment List is committed to making our rent estimates the best and most accurate available, and, as part of our efforts toward that goal, we’ve recently made some changes to our methodology. An overview of our new methodology can be found here, but today, we want to dig a bit deeper into one of the primary issues that we're aiming to correct: sample bias. What’s the problem? Sample bias is a statistical concept that refers to a situation in which some segments of the population are less likely to be included in sample data collection. In the case of rent
Why we are changing our rent methodology Apartment List publishes monthly reports on rental trends in U.S. cities and states. Renters and policymakers need good information in order to make sound decisions, and we invest significant time and effort in gathering and analyzing rent data. Our work is covered regularly by journalists across the country. Despite this, we recognize that our analysis has limitations. Today, we announce major updates to our methodology, which we believe addresses the shortcomings of other approaches. To provide transparency, this post outlines the limitations in current data sources, and the changes we have made.