How these market reports are built
Every figure on a market report traces to a public federal source or to IntellCRE's own audited reporting database. The "as of" date on each card is the freshness of that specific source — different metrics update on different cadences, so we never round them to a single uniform date.
Real-data rule
Nothing on a market page is synthesized, projected, or filled in. If a source returns nothing, the field is shown as "—" or "not available" — never a placeholder value, never an interpolation. This is enforced in code: the build emits null for any field the ETL lacks, and templates render those as the dash.
Per-metric sources
Demographics & economy
| Metric | Source | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Population | U.S. Census Bureau — ACS 1-Year (B01003) | Annual · Sep |
| Median household income | ACS 1-Year (B19013) | Annual |
| Renter share | ACS 1-Year (B25003) | Annual |
| Median gross rent | ACS 1-Year (B25064) | Annual |
| Unemployment rate | ACS B23025 (unemployed / civilian labor force) | Annual |
| Employment | ACS B23025 civilian employed (household basis, not CES nonfarm payroll) | Annual |
| Net migration | ACS B07001 inter-state migration proxy | Annual |
| Avg weekly wage | BLS Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) — Open Data CSV | Quarterly |
| Real GDP | BEA Metro GDP (CAGDP9) — currently blocked on an inactive API key | Annual |
| Residential permits | Census Bureau Building Permits Survey (BPS) — CBSA annual file. Total + structure breakdown (1u / 2u / 3-4u / 5+u, where 5+ = multifamily). | Annual · May |
Investment metrics & rents
| Metric | Source | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Cap rate by property type | Licensed national cap-rate reference data (multifamily, office, retail, industrial), covering all 50 states and roughly 17,000 ZIP codes; we take the median across the metro's ZIPs. Not derived from customer activity on the IntellCRE platform. | Monthly |
| Rent growth (multifamily) | Zillow ZORI rent index, trailing-12mo per-ZIP, rolled up via median across the metro. | Monthly |
| Fair Market Rent, studio–4 BR (HUD) | HUD Fair Market Rents (40th-percentile), per ZIP, median across the metro. Note: FMR typically runs below true asking rent. | Annual |
| Vacancy (multifamily) | Not available — there is no public per-CBSA vacancy source we can stand behind, so it is shown as "not available" rather than estimated. | — |
Sale comps
The Sales Activity aggregates and the Recent Sales Comps table draw from recorded multifamily sales sourced from public property records and third-party listing feeds — not from customer accounts. We surface the trailing 24 months of recorded sales in each metro. This is a representative sample, not an exhaustive market index.
The underlying feeds are general property data filtered to multifamily property types — public records plus third-party listing feeds. This is not a commercial brokerage database, and it does not cover office, retail or industrial sales. We also no longer show a cap rate on individual comps: the feeds that carry one report a quoted or modelled cap, not a confirmed closed-deal cap, and it was present on only about 5% of records — so it is omitted rather than shown unqualified.
- Coverage is broad across all 50 metros — from dozens to several thousand recorded sales per market over the window.
- Comps are multifamily only. Office, retail, and industrial recorded sales aren't included in this source.
- Recorded sale dates lag as public records post (often ~12 months), so the window is the trailing 24 months rather than 12 — a 12-month window would be near-empty.
- We still suppress the aggregate median when a metro has fewer than 10 recorded sales in the window, showing the individual transactions for reference instead — a guard that rarely triggers under current coverage.
- Comps with a sale price below $100k or above $10B are dropped as data-entry errors. Median $/unit only counts records whose per-unit value is between $10k and $5M, so a single mis-keyed entry can't yank the metro figure.
Market Update narrative
The "Market Update" paragraph at the top of each market page is generated by an AI model (currently gpt-4o-mini) grounded strictly to the numbers shown on the page plus the prior period's snapshot for delta computation. The model has no other knowledge of the market and is instructed not to invent figures. Each refresh archives the prior data artifact so period-over-period deltas accrue with the page itself.
Recent Market News
Listed news items are reported by third-party publishers (ConnectCRE, REBusinessOnline, etc.) and stored separately from the audited market metrics in data/market-news.json. Every item carries the publisher, original URL, and the as-reported date. Figures inside news items reflect the publisher's reporting, not IntellCRE's audited data.
Refresh cadence
- Monthly — full ETL re-run pulls fresh ACS, BLS, BPS, and IntellCRE DB data; market pages rebuild automatically.
- Weekly — research/news ingest refreshes "Recent Market News" and any Insights articles.
- Annual sources release on their own schedules — ACS 1-Year drops in September; BPS annual final lands the first working day of May.
Coverage caveats
- ZIP→CBSA rollups use HUD
fmr.metroas the crosswalk. ZIPs not present there are invisible to the rollup. - Metro rollups are unweighted medians/means across the metro's ZIPs — dense and sparse ZIPs count equally.
- CBSA boundaries are the OMB delineations effective at ETL time. Re-delineations between vintages can introduce small CBSA-code mismatches across sources.
Questions or corrections
If a number on a market page looks wrong, or you have a question about our data and sources, please contact us.