Jonathan Miller Launches Neighborhood-level Index

Real estate data comes with its own baggage.

Market analysts have often griped about the shortcomings of indexes looking to purport the health of the housing market, such as CoreLogic’s Case-Shiller or the one published by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which some say are riddled with discrepancies.

Data included in those reports are typically delayed or missing certain metrics such as property type. The analysis is often too broad, which obscures meaningful takeaways.

Now, one of real estate’s go-to market experts is throwing a solution into the ring.

Appraiser Jonathan Miller, along with economist Nick Huntington-Klein, is launching a new neighborhood-level housing index called StreetMatrix, the pair announced on Tuesday. The platform is kicking off with analytics for California and Nevada.

The platform, backed by data from recorded sales, multiple listing services and public records, “doesn’t have the problems we see in big national indexes,” said Miller, who has long criticized the major players in this space.

“What most housing indexes do is look at an entire city as one entity,” Miller said. “Having worked in housing, authored reports and appraised for a long time, we learned that there are many layers and sections of a market. We wanted to capture that and not make that mistake.”

The data will be subdivided by bedroom count and neighborhood, which Miller said is an industry first. The index will measure market performance over time with factors such as price, supply, number of transactions and days on market, which Miller and the team retrospectively verified with data going back to before the Great Recession.

“We’re tracking and measuring the shape of a micro market,” Miller said. The index “tells you, based on what type of property you have and where, how the market behaved over time.”

“Fun for a housing nerd,” he added.

Huntington-Klein, an economics professor at Seattle University, said that while the data powering StreetMatrix has existed, the company is launching now because the creators have access to more granular data in a standardized format that allows its models to analyze and control for factors that existing housing indices don’t.

“To build narrow, we needed enough data to say something, but drilled down enough” to get as local a take as possible, said Huntington-Klein. “That’s the needle we’ve been threading.”

The initial rollout will only include single-family homes in the two states, though the company plans to expand to other states, including Texas and New Mexico. Miller cautioned that StreetMatrix is not a tool to determine a value for a home like Zillow’s Zestimate, though the platform is already in talks with insurers about using the index to back financial products.

With the data from the index, StreetMatrix will begin publishing monthly reports for the states it is operating in starting in October. Though Miller will author those reports, he said he will still continue to publish market takes with Douglas Elliman and his appraisal firm, Miller Samuel.