Writing with numbers: Good data can lead to compelling tales
/By Jeff Collins, Orange County Register and NAREE President
Suppose you’re trying to figure out how many homeowners are struggling to pay their mortgage in your region. Or how many tenants are behind in their rent.Where do you go? Ouija Board? Tea leaves? Oracle of Delphi? A better bet, says Fifth Estate Media founder Mary Shanklin, would be the U.S. Census.And in particular, the census’ new Household Pulse Survey. “The census is notorious for really giving us a trailing indicator,” Shanklin said during a March 31 NAREE University Live held via Zoom. “But the good news is ... the census (now) has a more real-time release.”Shanklin was one of three speakers at the March 31 NAREE U, one of a series of online training sessions for real estate journalists launched during the pandemic in 2020.Other speakers included Ethan Rothstein, deputy managing editor for the online commercial real estate news site, Bisnow; and Stefanos Chen, real estate writer for the New York Times. Rothstein demystified the world of commercial real estate data, giving writers insights on where to find the best numbers and how to use them. Chen gave examples of how to overcome gaps in data sources and described how he once used dog license data to track gentrification. The Household Pulse Survey has four key metrics relevant for covering the pandemic, said Shanklin, a University of Central Florida journalism instructor and former real estate writer for the Orlando Sentinel. They include telework, housing insecurity, the likelihood of eviction and foreclosure and difficulty paying for the usual household expenses. The Household Pulse, which has numbers for the nation, states and key U.S. metro areas, has data as recent as two weeks ago. “It is warp speed compared to what we’ve been used to with the census,” Shanklin said. “The world’s been turned upside down in the last year. It seems like 2019 is archaic. So that is a better, more real-time set of data.”Other key census tools, Shanklin said, include the American Community Survey, which includes such housing data as the number of owner-occupied housing units, renter vacancies, mobile homes, the age of housing stock and population mobility, Shanklin said. The latest numbers are from 2019, with 2020 numbers expected as soon as September.
The ACS, available at data.census.gov, breaks data down to the county level. Another tool is Google Data Explorer, which bundles different types of metrics — birth rates, death rates, net migration — to help you visualize trends.
Commercial data
The census has good housing data, but is not as rich for commercial real estate.So where do you go to find trends in office occupancy as more and more people work from home? Where can you find data on industrial and warehouse trends as e-commerce booms? Rothstein, who specializes in commercial real estate, explained that virtually all the major commercial brokerages publish regular market reports on their websites on such topics as the office, retail and industrial markets.Newmark and JLL are the best because they give the most numbers, including the underlying numbers for their charts, Rothstein said. “If you open these reports, most of them are words,” Rothstein said. “When we’re doing research for data, we don’t really want the words. It’s interpretation. For the most part, I tend to ignore what they write, and I go to their charts and I go to their tables and I see what the numbers say.”Often, the narrations use words like “momentum” and “growth.” “They’re trying to make you see the numbers in a positive light,” when in reality, that may not be the case, he said. “It’s certainly spin city.” It’s also important, he said, to know the difference between vacancy and availability. Availability numbers include buildings under construction and leases that are expiring. Hence, availability numbers are more of an indication of the amount of space on the market than vacancy rates.
Gaps in data
Chen often struggles to find housing data in parts of New York City, where multiple listing services don’t exist. What numbers exist often have gaps. “We do not typically pull data from any one source,” Chen said. “When you trust a source, be aware that what’s in there might omit certain things. The omission itself could be the story.”Some sources, like StreetEasy, get all their information from the brokers, and the brokers have an incentive to paint a rosier picture, Chen said. Some new condo sellers report, for example, 50% of their units are under contract, when in fact, they’re only reporting sales for a portion of their buildings. When Chen got more complete data from the state, he learned just one in four new condos had been sold.Chen advised taking an Excel course so you can sort your data and get a clear picture of trends.“Having that background has helped a lot,” he said. Here’s a link to Shanklin’s tip sheet for census data. Links Rothstein finds helpful are: JLL, Newmark and Real Capital Analytics.
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Shanklin’s Tip Sheet
Links Rothstein finds useful include: