How do I find the number of housing units in an area?

Question

Is there a way that I can find the number of units of housing in a geographic area, including apartment units?

I'm trying to figure out raw number so that I can calculate the shortage of housing based on population and job growth in the surrounding area.

Geoff Blinks · Answer

Jeff Beard What if I want to draw a boundary over an area and get the stats just for the selected area? Is there a way to do that? The county and city-level is too broad, especially when analyzing a dense portion of a city.

Geoff Blinks · Answer

Jeff Beard huh?

Geoff Blinks · Answer

There has to be a way to do this; otherwise, how are commercial developers able to make accurate judgement calls about what to build...

Is there a business opportunity here in developing a tool that can aggregate and provide this level of, what I think to be, basic and fundamental demand analysis?

Jeff B. · Answer

and that's the rub - - vacancies.  another problem is the accuracy of the numbers and 'low sample counts' in the 4th,5th & 6th sigmas of distribution.  Being off just 1% skews the solutions.  Interesting approach but imo there's bigger risk in the results than in the accuracy of the samples.

Howard Klahr · Answer

What you are trying to accomplish is a market analysis for housing.  As you are already aware, the information necessary to perform calculations on small discrete geographic areas is limited at best.  The way to achieve what you are looking for is to use information based on the larger geographic areas such as the county or MSA level and then apportion that information  based on characteristics of your desired submarket area.

One of the other challenges is that the information available is historical and somewhat dated in that a running inventory is not calculated month to month or even year to year.  Consequently there is a bit of judgment associated with performing these type of analyses.

Here is a link to one data source that might get you started General Housing Data - All Housing Units (SELECTED METROPOLITAN AREAS)

Here are a few links to several books on the subject in case you want to look into this in detail:

Market Analysis for Real Estate, second edition

Real Estate Market Analysis Methods and Case Studies, Second Edition

Real Estate Market Analysis 1st Edition

Handbook for Real Estate Market Analysis

How to conduct and analyze real estate market and feasibility studies

Real Estate Market Analysis: A Case Study Approach

Geoff Blinks · Answer

@Sam M. I've run the numbers and it can't be accurate. It says there are only 4800 records for 90048. That doesn't sound accurate. Does the listsource "count" include, for example, each apartment building as a single count or does each door go into the count?

Sam M. · Answer

You could see the number of apartments, SFR's, Condos, etc by zip-code in ListSource. You can also see if they are owner-occupied or not.

Geoff Blinks · Answer

Let me give you a use-case here that is similar to what I'm trying to solve and maybe you can help me find an alternative approach.

A new hospital is being built that will employ 5,000 employees.

Vacancy rates in the area sit at 5% (which is effectively zero).

What net new number of housing is needed to support some % of the 5K employees who will want to live and work in the area?

If I knew that there were 10,000 residences and effectively zero vacancy, I could justify the development of a 200 unit apartment development because even if only 5% of the 5,000 new jobs want to rent in the area, that would show a need of 250 new units of housing.

Jeff B. · Answer

That's very sophisticated software, not seen it myself.

Jeff B. · Answer

U.S. Census Bureau collects and makes public all kinds of statistics, and as well as education, income, the track renters vs home owners.

Here's an example for Riverside

on the left, select California

under Places, select Riverside City, click Display

near the top under the title, click the DOWN arrow