Data Point: 2021-04-26, The ZORI 2014-2021

Preamble: I'm going to start a new thing called the "Data Point" where I quickly put up a particular point of data. This is the first. There is a lot of data, there is a constant stream of data. And there is a lot of conversations. Sometimes these two streams do not appear to intersect. So: the Data Point. You provide the context and the narrative, but start with data.

The ZORI

The ZORI is the Zillow Observed Rent Index from, you guessed it, Zillow, Zillow provides a variety of data at their Data page.

Zillow's definition of the ZORI: "A smoothed measure of the typical observed market rate rent across a given region. ZORI is a repeat-rent index that is weighted to the rental housing stock to ensure representativeness across the entire market, not just those homes currently listed for-rent. The index is dollar-denominated by computing the mean of listed rents that fall into the 40th to 60th percentile range for all homes and apartments in a given region, which is once again weighted to reflect the rental housing stock. Details available in ZORI methodology."

So how does the ZORI look, by zip code, for Grand Rapids:

Image is a link to full-size image (click it).

I included an incomplete zip code to neighborhood correlation in the image.

Notably absent from the data is zip code 49503 which includes Highland Park, MIdtown, and Belknap/NOBL.

Surprising, at least to me, is that the COVID19 pandemic is barely noticeable.