A Call for Data and a "Data Commons"

As part of our effort to level the informational playing field for buyers, OC Prudent Bears is looking to expand the set of data that we use to perform our analyses. So far, we've been able to find some fairly good published data and have posted what I believe to be useful and beneficial analysis and commentary on that data, but when we're foraging (foraging bears, LOL!) for data we can only get so far. Frankly, I'd like to up the game.

With that in mind, I'm putting out a request to the community at large to share data. If you or someone you know has data on pricing, inventory, rental levels, demographics, housing stock, closed deals, current deals, terminated deals, square footage of homes for sale/sold or any other data, I'd like to hear from you.

We are primarily looking for this data at a county and ZIP level and the more years of data the better. It doesn't matter if the data is culled from the web, taken from some kind of publication, the census, a university study, something you have under license, data your company sells as long as it's legal.

I wanted to float another idea in this post well. My guess is that there's a lot of redundant data gathering effort going among the members of the blogger/buyer community. I think it might make sense to also talk about the creation of a "data commons" where interested parties could contribute to and benefit from a "master" database of real estate and demographic data. As I see it, the more data we can aggregate in on place, the less work it will be for each of us and the more roubust analysis, better insights we can provide to the buyer community.

You can contact me by clicking on the Mail Your Blogger link at the bottom of this page.