New Service Tracks Prices on Millions of Houses and Forecasts How They Will Change

Allan Weiss, co-founder and CEO of the company that pioneered the Case-Shiller price index, has developed a service that provides “house-specific” monitors to track price movement on 50 million U.S. single-family homes. Weiss Residential Research also forecasts prices on individual homes up to a year into the future. It continues to gather data on interior living spaces, tax assessments, mortgage balances, property age, appraisal information, and other characteristics; and it plans to add another 20 million houses to its database down the road. Consumers will soon be able to purchase one-year forecasts and line graphs for $25. The company also plans to release neighborhood-level “heat maps.” Whether these projections are accurate remains to be seen; but Weiss researchers tested their accuracy on 10,356 randomly selected homes in 17 states, with an accuracy rate of 74 percent to 84 percent. | Read More