Real Estate and Other Data Sources for Big Data project

[Bobby Thompson]

Hey Folks, Data nerd here. I originally posted this is innovative strategies forum but i think this forum might be a better home for this topic. Looking for as many publicly available (free) real estate data sets as I can get my hands on. I'm also interested in curated reports or data that may be related to the real estate market (Commercial info, sales in other markets, jobs reports, retail store locations). I'm currently working on merging or overlaying home value, rent, school ratings, state census info for fun. I'd love to take advantage of larger companies marketing and planning. I bet a company like Whole Foods is pretty sure an area is going to grow in population and/or income before they drop a new location.

Let me know if you're aware of any data sets like the ones I mentioned above. I'm specifically interested in data sets in the Massachusetts and Rhode Island but national sources are good too. What do you use to do your research?  

[Jennifer S.]

@Bobby Thompson, came across this old thread while searching for Rhode Island. I have been trying to develop something that combines different data like household income, median home price, school rank, etc. I posted something about this at https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/564/topics/51...

That lens was more focused on suburban SF but I'm also interested in developing something for MF. For SF the school quality had seemed more important to me at first but other posters said the market is so hot that anything decent is selling.

Since I posted I found some other free data sites I'll be investigating over time (I also want to avoid analysis paralysis):

http://databrowser.mapc.org/

This has all kinds of stuff on population projects by age range (eg 20-34), income, crime. I love data and that thing is overwhelming me.

http://www.massbuilds.com/developments/

Shows upcoming development projects in Mass towns. The data export is hard to deal with at first glance.

http://www.bostonmagazine.com/best-school-district...

I haven't found a school data set I can easily export into Excel. This was the closest

Not sure if you're on BP anymore, but maybe other data geeks might see this