How to find historical rent prices for a specific area?

Question

How to find single family house historical rent prices for a specific area?

Zillow data only gives you historical data for SFR in the metro level but not city or zip code level.

Where else can I find historical rental data for a city/zip?

I'm trying to compare 2 cities to see how the rents go up there year over year.

Jake Andronico · Answer

@Justin Brin

We've been scraping rental comps from Zillow for the last 18 months. We have it mapped out across Northern Nevada and use it to analyze every active property simultaneously.

Besides scraping, I don't know how one is able to look at the historical data.

Justin Brin · Answer

I see that HUD has historical data per zip code here (40th percentile of the rent prices in the area used for section 8):

https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr/smallarea/index....

I'm not sure how accurate is their data in some of the zip codes.

Here data data is broken down by bedroom count so you can get and idea if it's a house or an apartment depending on the area and room count.

Zillow data is limited depending on the zip code. For some zip codes there is not much data.

They also mix in apartments data with houses data.

Justin Brin · Answer

Does it also provide historical data?

Robbin S Smith · Answer

I use Rentometer Pro. There is a free version, but I use it so much that ran over the first week of use. But if you just want an idea of rents for a limited number of units, the free version may work for you.