Zillow rent inflation update: November

The latest in a series.

This is the 3rd post in a series of post that tracks Zillow’s home value and rent data, which is by far the cleanest dataset on like-on-like home prices and rents in the United States. It’s much better than the flawed methodology of ApartmentList and some other widely-quoted measures. It tends to track Case-Shiller fairly closely most of the time, although it must be a much larger sample.

October Zillow inflation update

August Zillow rental inflation update

Generic inflation comment (late August)

Anyway, here’s the November update.

Hmm. I found it pretty surprising.

(This is a population weighted index. So the 3 biggest cities’ changes could outweigh the 30 smallest, most inflationary cities in terms of impact to the weighted average.)

But the Big Blue Laggards are catching up to the national average, not showing any loss of momentum.

The top performers, which are generally 1-2m population MSAs (1/5 the size of the top 5 cities), are showing slightly flagging momentum, but not enough to cause a ripple of a slowdown in the national average.

The bottom 8 worst performers are still very soft, with a weak first derivative and weakening 2nd derivative.

I’m going to assume that the superhot suburban markets are cooling off by more than the blue capital cities are mean-reverting, combined with a comp effect. But I’ll also wait before calling a top here (and keep in mind that for rent and home transactions, which is what Zillow measures, this is seasonally the slowest time of the year.)