bostonbubble.com

[balor123]

rentBits. I don't remember if I posted this already but I don't think so. Maybe useful for determining when people are moving into houses or the strength of the economy?

[GenXer]

What is mind boggling is the discrepancy in rates for towns which are right next to each other (well, almost). I can't believe some of the rents I'm seeing. The rents can't be this high - maybe there are a lot of wishful thinkers trying to rent out their places instead of paying their mortgage?

[SamChady]

I noticed also fluctuations from month-to-month of almost 30%, and this can't be true. My guess is that this site has a very small dataset.

Also, look at Jan 09 data - all the data is at the same point. Why would rents converge, ever?

When I looked at my town, things looked too high to me in comparison to the fliers I see posted in town for rentals.

[balor123]

I agree that the dataset isn't very good but it's the best that I could find which is free. There are companies which compile this information but they charge money. Any other good sources? Maybe we could put something together from Craigslist postings but hard to distinguish unique inventory. Historical data would be very useful as well.

[JCK]

Another website, rentometer.com, was posted a while back.

I don't know if its data is any good, but it seemed more reasonable. I think a lot of these compiled listings are heavy on the larger, full service buildings, and light on the individually owned apartments and homes.

[StallionMang]

This looks like a good site - though sparse data as well

http://www.myapartmentmap.com/rentaldata/ma/
http://www.myapartmentmap.com/rentaldata/ma/belmont/

[GenXer]

[url]http://www.myapartmentmap.com/rentaldata/ma/ [/url]
Skewed! Very unrealistic rental statistics - they are skewed by several huge data points. Just go to Roxbury - rents did NOT increase by 80%!
Can not believe these numbers because we do not know how many data points there are.

[StallionMang]

I went to delicious and looked around. Found Zilpy..it's *really, really* good

nice features:

Granular heat map - Waltham has 13(!) blocks
Roll over a pin to see rooms/price/thumbnail without clicking
Graphs/trends, including my favorite: PSF
They show their work - listings going back to 2007
Active & historical rentals on same map
Lists square footage for about half (is it reliable?)
Does not draw conclusions from sparse data. Minimum 5 rentals in a category/month.

Drawbacks

Does not scrape Craigslist

Interview with a woman from the company.

[balor123]

People still use delicious? They're traffic peaked last time I checked.

[balor123]

That website is really good! Except I wish the historical data went further back in time. Looks like the average 2br rental in Waltham costs $1.03/sqFt/mo and for 2br houses according to Trulia $193/sqFt so it would take 193/(12*1.03)=15.6 years to make up the cost of buying, not including taxes, maintainance, interest, etc. As I've mentioned before, in this area the quality of rentals is at least as good if not superior to the prices for sale for many units. Given the large number of lower income people in the city, I'm guessing that Waltham was more affected by the housing bubble. Strangely, the market is holding up very well. Unemployment is low for the city but still...

[StallionMang]

well, delicious backs up its DB at least - unlike magnolia I found it useful to get up to speed on a tag, or tag intersection. What bookmarking site do you like?

[balor123]

I don't use bookmarking sites, though I agree that they could be useful. I think people like StumbleUpon right? I've never used it. I tend to rely on news sources to find new websites.

[SamChady]

Although this is speculation, I worry that rents from advertised asking rents would be used when in fact these rents can be sometimes negotiated down. The flip side to my argument is that sometimes teaser rates are used by Realtors and when you call to ask, those units are gone, but they have another to look at.

Perhaps these 2 opposing forces would cancel themselves out.

The other problem is that I think nicer places are advertised via Realtors and bigger sites, and smaller less nice and less profit margin places are on Craigslist or even not advertised at all. Many homes in my area are advertised with a flier and a sign, and I am sure they are cheaper then the larger complexes.

In the end though, if the dataset is large enough, it would still show a nice trend line, even if the absolute number was off. Of course, we'll never know the true number as its not a legal requirement to post them (like home sales prices are). Realtors probably have some good data, but its not in their interest to release it since they want rents to look high.

Just like homes also, the rent per square foot is a nice trend line, but its tough to use for individual decisions since the home's or apartment's quality and location are so variable, even within one town or even a portion of the town. This is frustrating me a bit since I want to move into Boston from the Western suburbs, and I am willing to get a very small place to try to keep the rent down, and data is so hard to come by.

[showgunx]

Why the spike of rent in brighton recently? Again, Is it true that average people paying $1800+ rent for 2 beds in brighton? Are those students from BU get their grants again all at once?
I thought $1500 might be more realestic...