How we show housing costs

We show what people actually pay, not what sellers and landlords are asking. For homes that means recorded sales. For rentals it means observed asking rents across a whole area rather than any single unit. The two are different numbers, and the gap between them is where most of the confusion in a home search lives.

Asking is not paying

A listing price is an opinion. It is what someone hopes to get, set before any buyer has responded. Some sell above it, some well below, and some never sell at all and quietly disappear.

A recorded sale is a fact. Two parties agreed, money moved, and the county wrote it down. That is a much sounder basis for “what does this area cost” than a wall of asking prices.

Why we do not use listings

This is the question we get most, so here is the full answer.

Active listings in the United States mostly flow through the multiple listing services, and access to them is tightly controlled. The large portals have spent years consolidating that access. Licensing it for a product like this is expensive, comes with rules about how the data may be shown, and can be withdrawn. Building a search tool on top of that is building on someone else’s permission.

Beyond access, listings are the wrong tool for what we do:

• They describe today’s inventory, not the area. If four houses are for sale in a neighborhood this week, those four tell you very little about the other nine hundred.
• They are biased toward what is currently selling. Areas that rarely turn over look empty even when they are the ones you would most want to live in.
• They vanish. A listing that is withdrawn takes its price with it, so a listings-based history quietly forgets the failures and remembers the successes.

We are trying to answer “what is it like to live in this area,” not “what can I buy this week.” For that question, transactions beat advertisements. The portals do the second job well and you should use them for it — after you have narrowed down where to look.

What the numbers mean

Both layers are area figures, not property estimates. We are not valuing your house or predicting your rent.

We show a typical value rather than an average, because a handful of very expensive properties drag an average upward and leave you with a number that describes nothing in the area. The typical value is closer to what you would actually encounter.

You can see both on the map: home costs and rents.

Where the figures come from

Home costs are built on recorded property transactions, which are public records. Rent figures come from advertised rents gathered across the country and refreshed regularly.

Every page showing a cost figure carries the date we last checked it, because these move faster than most of the other data on the site.

What this cannot tell you

• It is not an appraisal. No area figure knows about your renovated kitchen or the motorway behind the garden.
• Rent figures follow advertised units. Renewals for existing tenants are usually cheaper than what is advertised, so the number leans a little high for people staying put.
• It lags. Recorded sales arrive after the fact. In a market moving fast, the map is describing a few months ago.
• It says nothing about the total cost of living there. Property taxes, insurance and utilities vary enormously between two places with identical prices. Those are separate layers for a reason.

The useful way to use it

Put a cost layer underneath the things you actually care about. Set the commute, the schools, the safety level you want, and then look at what the surviving areas cost.

That order matters. Starting from a budget and working outward tends to produce a list of places you can afford but do not want. Starting from what you want and then seeing the price shows you which of your requirements is the expensive one — which is the thing you can actually make a decision about.

Both layers are on the map, free to use.