A groundbreaking database that tracks 13 decades of annual changes in U.S. home sales and rental prices provides a clearer picture of economic shifts through the 20th century and will be a valuable resource for homebuyers, housing policymakers and the real estate industry, a UC Merced researcher said.
Professor Rowena Gray teamed up with three other economists to develop the publicly available database, called the Historical Housing Prices Project (HHP). With a few clicks, anyone can create fever lines or bar charts of year-by-year price changes in the U.S. or in any of the 30 major cities the project targeted. For instance, users can compare home sales from 1930 to 1990 in San Francisco, Portland and Boston.
A paper that lays out the HHP’s methods and conclusions explains the data is drawn from 2.7 million listings in newspaper real estate sections from 30 major U.S. cities. The pages, originally saved on microfilm, were accessed at websites that digitally archived the microfilm.
Previous studies of U.S. housing prices and trends were pieced together with disparate and sometimes limited data sources. The HHP features a concise analysis of a consistent source of information. On top of that, the data spans 116 years, stretching from the invention of the pneumatic tire to the mapping of the human genome.
“Before now, we didn’t have a systematically collected annual dataset on rents and sales prices for this number of cities over such a long stretch of time,” said Gray, a faculty member in UC Merced’s Department of Economics and Business Management .
The dataset starts in 1890, when housing listings began to appear consistently in newspapers, and ends in 2006, when real estate pages began to vanish due to the incursion of online sites such as Craigslist.
Gray started working on housing data several years ago while on the faculty of the University of Essex. In 2018, she connected at a conference with Professor Ronan Lyons, who was doing similar research at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Allison Shertzer, an economic adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, joined the project as a third principal investigator. Ph.D. candidate David Agorastos of the University of Pittsburgh completed the team. They secured a National Science Foundation grant to start work on what became the HHP, which the Philadelphia Fed hosts on its website.
