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Range Insightsby Range Lab

About the data

Range Insights publishes aggregates of data Range Lab already collects to run its tools: rental listings gathered daily for the Rental Search Tool (RST), and the community-resource directory maintained in Pathfinder and served by Rangefinder. A snapshot runs every day; each page shows the date of the snapshot it reflects.

Housing market

  • What a listing is. A rental unit advertised on a listing site or property-manager website that RST collects from. A unit advertised on several sites is usually merged into one record, though some duplicates remain. Listing counts match the county counts on rentalsearchtool.com: a listing is placed in a county by its city, using RST's county list plus a few towns it does not yet include. RV spaces are counted as listings but excluded from every rent, unit-size and FMR figure.
  • Active. Still advertised. A listing counts as off the market once it has been missing from its source for five days, so removals appear with a short lag.
  • Asking rent, not contract rent. Rents are what landlords advertise. Signed leases, renewals and units that never get advertised are not included. Asking rents usually run above what existing tenants pay.
  • Rent statistics use listings with an asking rent between $200 and $15,000 a month. A median or range is published only when at least 5 priced listings back it; smaller groups show counts only. ZIP × size rows with fewer than 3 listings are omitted.
  • New listings are those first seen in the last seven days. When a new source is added, hundreds of existing listings appear on the same day; a day with more than 40 first sightings and more than 8× the county's usual daily count is treated as a bulk load and excluded. “New” counts are withheld for the first 14 days after a county starts being tracked.
  • Price cuts are listings whose asking rent dropped in the last seven days. Changes that look like a listing switching between sale and rent prices are ignored.
  • Coverage. Collection is county by county. Listings on sites RST does not collect from are missing, and small landlords who advertise offline are under-represented. Counts are best read as a trend within a county, not as a census of vacant units.
  • History before tracking began is rebuilt from each listing's first and last sighting and its recorded price changes, and is marked “rebuilt from listing history” wherever it appears.

HUD Fair Market Rent and income limits

  • Fair Market Rents (FMR) come from HUD for the county, by unit size, for the fiscal year the date falls in (HUD fiscal years start October 1). If that year is not loaded yet, the most recent earlier year is used and labeled.
  • FMR is a gross rent, including utilities. Advertised rents often exclude some utilities, so “at or below FMR” somewhat overstates what a voucher can reach once a utility allowance is applied.
  • Voucher payment standards are set by each housing authority, usually 90–110% of FMR. Small Area FMRs, where they apply, can differ from the county figure.
  • Affordable rent at 30%, 50% and 80% of area median income uses HUD income limits and HUD's sizing convention of 1.5 people per bedroom (one for a studio), at 30% of monthly income.

Community services

  • Counts are public, active listings in the Range Lab directory: exactly what Rangefinder shows. Draft, private and archived records are never counted.
  • A listing counts toward a county when its service area is that county. Statewide programs have no county and are counted on the state page only.
  • Essential services are twelve categories every county is expected to have locally: food, shelter, housing assistance, medical, mental health, addiction, domestic violence, legal aid, employment, transportation, childcare and utilities. “None listed” means none in the directory, which can mean a real gap or a listing we do not have yet.
  • Hours-based shares (evening, weekend) are out of listings with structured hours. “Reviewed” means a staff review within the last 90 days; many listings, especially those imported from 211 directories, have not been individually reviewed.
  • Newly listed means a listing became public in the directory that week. When a large import happens, many existing services become “new” at once; this reflects the directory, not services opening.
  • Per-resident rates use 2020 Census county population.

Privacy

Everything on this site is an aggregate. No page shows an individual renter, landlord, listing address, or search. Range Lab's case-management data (Pathfinder clients, households and referrals) is not used here.

Citing Range Insights

“Range Insights, Range Lab. [County], [State]. Data as of [date on the page]. insights.rangelab.io.” Every table can be downloaded as CSV. Questions or corrections: hello@rangelab.io.