Improving Rental Market Data

The United States should prioritize filling critical housing data gaps in domains where non-existent or poor-quality data prevent us from addressing the housing crisis—one such area is rental market data. 

While developing the scope and structure of a National Housing Data Authority (NHDA), there should be federal support to begin building the partnerships and shared infrastructure needed to make fragmented and largely proprietary rental market data easier to find, connect, and use. Not only would help to fill a critical gap, but it also could demonstrate the value for the broader institutional and technical architecture that a future NHDA would need, that a federal authority could eventually build upon. 

U.S. rental prices are unaffordable to a growing swath of the population. The latest estimates show that 22.7 million renter households—49 percent of all renters—spend more than 30 percent of their income on rent and utilities.²⁹ For low-income renters, the housing affordability problem is even more acute: Around 74 percent of extremely low-income renters are severely cost-burdened, spending more than half their income on housing.³⁰ 

Meanwhile, address-level data on the rents, ownership, and condition of private-market rental units is lagged and not available in real-time, preventing effective intervention. The real-time private rental market data that does exist is largely proprietary, collected by real estate companies and private data vendors. The software company RealPage, for example, has become the primary source of rental market data nationally despite facing litigation over allegations of price-fixing and market manipulation. When data gaps are filled by data vendors and other private companies that leverage nonpublic information in harmful ways, it raises serious questions about what it means to give opaque systems a monopoly over our understanding of an entire market.

This support could include mapping existing data and identifying gaps, as well as developing common standards, facilitating data-sharing agreements, producing integrated data products and research, and piloting approaches to filling priority gaps. Starting with a data discovery for private rental information, this effort could highlight key questions and identify priorities for improving rental market data. This effort would draw on the expertise and knowledge of housing data actors including government agencies, tenants and tenant organizations, and other rental market actors, and would carefully assess sources such as: 

• The National Housing Preservation Database (NHPD), which combines property-level data on federally assisted rental properties that receive federal grants, low-interest loans, LIHTC subsidies and other tax credits, public housing, and eight other federal programs, and is updated quarterly.³¹
• The Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI), which provides the typical market-rate rent at the zip code, city, county, metro, and national levels, and is updated on a monthly basis.
• Rental market characteristics produced from federal government surveys, including the Rental Housing Finance Survey (RHFS), American Community Survey (ACS), and American Housing Survey (AHS), which provide data on rental units, such as number of bedrooms, median gross rent, rental vacancy, and physical property condition, at differing levels of geography and time periods.  

The discovery process would also surface prevalent use cases for this data, including, for example: 

• Assessing which zoning and regulatory changes boost affordable rental supply.³²
• Tracking the impact of housing unaffordability on different forms of housing insecurity, including eviction, foreclosures, and living in low-quality housing or overcrowded conditions.
• Addressing code violations, identifying serial evictors, and preserving rental housing. 

The information from the data discovery, combined with the use cases, should inform an action plan that reflects strategies for improving the granularity, timeliness, and comprehensiveness of rental market data. A rental improvement data action plan, targeted to specific actors, could include, for example:

• Creating a federal pilot mandating or incentivizing state and local governments to develop rental registries, carried out in partnership with HUD through legislation or through a competitive grant program implemented by the State and Local Data Hub. 
• Requiring owners with mortgages guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to provide property-level rent data, put forth and overseen by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) through guidance changes to the GSEs.  
• Expanding the scope of the American Community Survey to collect data on households receiving government subsidies, through a Census Bureau, HUD, and NHDA collaboration to develop and test appropriate questions.
• Providing funding to researchers to create linkages across national and local rental market datasets to track housing affordability and stability over time, through funds made available through the National Housing Data Exchange.
• Creating public-private databases of private-market rent using a combination of local data such that it can be integrated with existing databases such as the NHPD, also potentially through the Exchange or another entity. 

In many cases, these recommendations could inform the priorities and strategic plans of other core functions of the NHDA. Taken together, the components above constitute a multilayered strategy for improving data on rental markets, where the three core functions of the NHDA reinforce each other’s mission.