Scraped Online Rental Listings

Data Summary

This database is part of an ongoing collaboration between CSDE and the Department of Sociology to generate information on rental housing markets via scraped online housing advertisements. Individual listings are scraped, processed, and geocoded. These scraped data are temporally and geographically precise, making them useful for a range of research topics. The data are currently used to understand the distribution of affordable rental housing in U.S. metropolitan areas, to investigate processes of neighborhood change, and to assess variations in the way that housing is advertised to those engaged in the housing search process. Neighborhood-level estimates derived from these data appeared in the 2018 Seattle Rental Housing Study conducted by the UW for the City of Seattle.

Temporal Extent

Cross-sectional, daily from 2017 to 2019

Geographic Extent

Three MSAs since February 2017; 100 largest MSAs since December 2018

Unit of Analysis

Rental listings

Institutional Partners

CSDE and Sociology