Shadow market tracking

I think the multi-family industry in general is looking for a way to track the shadow market. The shadow being that elusive number of single-family homes that are up for rent as opposed to sale.

One way to track is to set up the RSS function in Craigslist. I used this when I lived in Portland, Oregon and now do the same in Saint Louis, Misery. (not a typo, just a state of mind). The feed will dump every new update into your feedreader thus giving you a sense for the volume of ads being added in each respective listing topic. In Portland the number was well over 200 new ads every 12 hours. That was tracking the apts / housing section of their site. That number was in April of 2007 and was up from roughly 100 ads every 12 hours in the months of Oct, Nov and Dec of 2006. Suggesting to me that the shadow market started to swell in Q1 of 07.

It’s not science but it at least gave me a sense for what we were up against.

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