HomeTracker HousingTracker

Friday, August 19 2005 - 0 Comments

I continue to be captivated by the real estate market in this country and have thus started recording home asking prices for roughly 40 metro areas in the United States with data derived from MLS listings (via some Perl magic). It's not cause I'm a homeowner and have a substantial investment on the line. It's because I can't help but worry that the prospects of my ever owning anything are moving further away with each passing week. I don't know if this will turn out to be the case in the long term, but it's certainly the trajectory we're on right now.

One of the things I've always been frustrated with is the lack of timely data on what's happening in different housing market. NAR releases its quarterly reports on cities across the US, but it's really an after-the-fact report. I'm more curious how things are looking right now. It must be the scientist/engineer in me. So, that's what HousingTracker tries to provide. Currently it's just the latest weekly snapshot of home/condo asking prices (25th percentile, 50th percentile - median, and 75th percentile) and inventory (number of homes for sale) for a given city. After I have a couple of weeks worth of data there will be individual pages for each city/metro where trend data is presented. I think that by watching the inventory and median prices over time I'll be able to have a better idea of where these individual markets are heading and how quickly they're heading there. We'll see as the numbers gather though.

Update: I changed the name of the site to HousingTracker cause I forgot to google HomeTracker before I published this. There seems to be lots of copyrights etc. on HomeTracker, but I think HousingTracker is safe. Thus, the new name. Oh, and the individual city page design is gonna look something like this.

Posted by Ben at August 19, 2005 06:07 PM

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