A new look for local housing statistics
If you enjoy soaking in raw data about the local housing market, you'll want to update your website bookmarks.
Metropolitan Regional Information Systems, which runs the area's multiple-listing service, has moved its publicly available home-sale statistics to a different site as part of its new RealEstate Business Intelligence arm. Most of the monthly data you could find on the old site (number of sales, prices, pending deals) has been moved over, with the rest slated to come later, the RBI folks say. There's new stuff there, too.
RBI calculates the month-over-month change for you as well as the usual year-over-year, for instance. It also put together charts that show at a glance the change in the last several years by home sales, pending deals, average and median price, etc. And there's a list of the biggest movers (up and down) in the Baltimore-Washington area by price, sales and the like.
If you prefer videos, you'll find some here.
The firm is set to roll out more options this week as it promotes a new "premium product" for customers -- agents, brokers, appraisers -- that is designed to make slicing the data simpler. (What's the trend for four-bedroom Colonials in Baltimore County, for instance.)
If you're not in that target audience, the revamped site will still mean more to look at than you had access to before, said Jonathan Hill, president of RBI. There's a heat map for the region that you can adjust to show days on market, new listings and other useful statistics, plus you'll get a ranking of every jurisdiction covered by MRIS.
Hill said RBI is also making available to all visitors some monthly reports that used to go only to MRIS customers.
RBI was created to make better use of MRIS's data, Hill said. "Aside from looking at the monthly picture, we really haven't taken the opportunity to delve deeply into the data and mine the data and look for trendlines," he said. The company wanted to change that, and to offer more than a backwards look at the housing market.
By analyzing the search terms real estate agents and consumers are using, Hill said, RBI can try to get a handle on future trends. "Because the things that everybody's looking at today are the things they're going to be writing contracts on tomorrow, the next month," he said.
I got a preview of the site that's going live this week, but I'm more familiar with RBI's current stats offering, which recently replaced the old MRIS statistics page (now showing the dreaded "Page Not Found" warning). What's missing is the ability to download to Excel -- doh! -- but Hill says they're working on that. Also yet to appear are statistics for the Baltimore metro area before 2006, which Hill says will migrate over later.
Once you've romped among the stats, weigh in on whether you find the site more or less useful than its predecessor.
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