Brief Overall Description of the Dataset: There are some publicly available data sets whose names are as follows: Sales of Existing Homes and Month Over-the-Year Home Price Changes. The data sets cite their sources as “RealEstate Business Intelligence, MRIS, and GMU Center for Regional Analysis.” From emailing back and forth with someone from the Center for Regional Analysis, we found out that the Center has been given access to some MRIS data (which is property level data),and we were put into contact to someone from MRIS.
Link: http://cra.gmu.edu/data/
Date Inventory Completed: 5/26/2015-6/3/2015
Screening
- Is the data collected opinion-based?
- Is the data collection recurring (must be collected at least annually)?
- Is there data available for 2013?
- Is the data collected at the property or housing unit level?
- Can we access the data by August 15th?
Purpose
What is the purpose of the organization collecting the data?
The Center for Regional Analysis at GMU provides information about the “Greater Washington” area and the US as a whole. They brand themselves as “the premier source for knowledge and information about Greater Washington.”
Why is it collected and how does the organization use it?
The Center for Regional Analysis at GMU collects this housing data in order to increase their standing as the “premier source” for “Greater Washington” “knowledge and information.” The organization uses the data to generate aggregate publicly available data, and it more than likely uses the data for papers.
Who else uses the data?
Policy-makers and researchers use the data.
Who do they sell the data to?
They do not sell the data to anyone.
Method
What is the data collection method?
The sources listed for the housing data are Real Estate Business Intelligence, MRIS, and GMU Center for Regional Analysis. Therefore, they have taken some data from other sources and possibly have some of their own data. They do say that they “develop forecasts for the region,” so this might be a source of some of their own data. However, a full description of any of their data collection methods (if there are such methods) seems to be missing, and we do not know if they have made any forecasting concerning housing.
What is the type of data collected?
They obtain data from “RealEstate Business Intelligence, MRIS, and GMU Center for Regional Analysis” for housing data. I have talked to someone at the Center via email, and she says they have “existing home sales data” at the “property level.” Therefore, from all of this, we can say that some of the data is from administrative records.
If designed, who created the questions?
If GMU does collect its own survey data, it is still unclear who would have created the questions.
What is the raw source of the collected data (prior to any aggregation)?
The raw source is somewhat unknown. For the data that originated from administrative records, the source would be the forms that went into creating those records. If GMU does collect its own data, the raw source is unknown (because they have not made their ‘data collection methods’ clear).
Description
What is the general topic of the data (1-2 words)?
For the publicly available aggregate data: Sales and Prices
For the data they obtain from MRIS: Property-level data
What are the earliest and latest dates for which data is available?
For the publicly available aggregate data: 2009-2015
For the MRIS data: Unknown
Timeliness
Is data collected and available periodically?
The data does appear to be available after every month (at least for the data available on the website).
For the MRIS data: Unknown (especially because the Center for Regional Analysis uses the data and therefore does not generate it themselves)
How soon after a reference period ends can a data source be prepared and provided?
At most about a month for the publicly available data
For the MRIS data: unknown
Selectivity
What is the universe (e.g., population) that the data represents?
For publicly available aggregate data: Properties in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area, the District of Columbia, Northern Virginia, and Suburban Maryland
Accessibility
How is the data accessed?
Publicly available data: Excel and PDF
MRIS Data: Unknown
Is it open data?
The publicly available aggregate data is open data.
Property-level data/MRIS Data: Not open
Any legal, regulatory, or administrative restrictions on accessing the data source?
For the property-level/MRIS data, we will need to put together a larger explanation of the project and submit to Jonathan Hill, MRIS, VP Marketing & Communication. From there, if we could obtain the data, we would find out if there are “any legal, regulatory, or administrative restrictions on accessing the data source.”
Cost? - One time or annual or project based payment?
Unknown right now.
Does this dataset appear to meet our needs for the Census study? No
Explanation:
The Center for Regional Analysis does not have its own property level data, so they do not have their own data sets that would “meet our needs.”
However, through them, we were able to contact MRIS. If we send information to this MRIS contact (which is listed above in the “Accessibility” section), we may be able to get property level data for Arlington County.
Therefore, the Center for Regional Analysis is not the right contact for this project, but the Center did lead us to a very promising contact.