I need historical real estate sales data for a particular city

December 18, 2004 12:26 PM

I am looking for a resource, preferably online, that will give me historical real estate sales data for a particular city. Ideally I would like to see the average sales price by month from the year 1974 until the present. Any ideas?
posted by tirebouchon to grab bag (5 comments total)

This might help a little (though it's not by city). HUD would probably be a good place to look around for more.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 12:57 PM on December 18, 2004

This is hard! Good Luck.

The City of Boston's Department of Neighborhood and Development does a quarterly study of real estate trends, but they only have studies available online going back to 1998. I'm pretty sure they have studies going back further, but you'll probably have to call them to get copies.

There was a study done by the Archdiocese of Boston and Northeastern Public Policy Center of Boston's inflated housing costs. It mostly talks about trends in the 90's and doesn't spell out all the data, but you may want to look at the sources they used.

You may want to look at various Department of Neighborhood and Development websites to see if their data is more thorough. I don't know of any other agency that does studies like this. In my experience, local real estate boards don't do them, and they charge a fee for information they have (but YMMV.)
posted by sophie at 2:06 PM on December 18, 2004

It might be easier to track increased value via tax records, and then separately come up with a formula with attempts to correlate tax assessment with real sales value. All tax info should be public data, but in NYC I know only the last few years are available online.
posted by Mo Nickels at 2:34 PM on December 18, 2004

Depends on what city. Portland, Oregon has great resources and has their whole database online. Most cities are not so enlightened.
posted by SpecialK at 7:44 PM on December 18, 2004

I briefly worked in a real estate office and I had access to a national database that has all of the information about everything that you'd possibly want to know. Homes with 2.5 baths, big kitchen, at least 15 windows, within 5 miles of a police station, within 2 miles of a public school, etc... No problem with the database. Only problem is that you have to work in real estate to have access.

Good luck!
posted by crazy finger at 11:20 PM on December 18, 2004