Methods
How Open Rent builds its rental housing data
A guide to the sources, classifications, and rent figures behind Open Rent, and what the data can and cannot tell us.
Read the article →Open Rent Initiative
Building the technology backbone for housing justice.
Critical housing decisions are made with fragmented information, data that's dark and an uneven technology playing field. We're fixing that.
Explore
Mountain View Pilot
Rental stock overview, map, comparisons, and data queries.
Explore the pilot →Build
Tools in Development
COPA Triage Tool, Preservation Knowledge Engine, and Missing Middle Atlas.
Explore the three tools →About us
Open Rent is building a new type of housing data and technology infrastructure
We work with local partners to collect, clean, and integrate disparate datasets such as parcel and assessor records, rent registries, ownership, and active market listings into a single platform. This technology backbone enables our partners to build tools and applications aimed at making housing more stable and equitable.
About the initiative →How it works
From scattered records to a city that can see clearly
We aggregate
Parcel and assessor records, state/federal housing data, ownership information, rent registries, market listings and secure data from partners — gathered from dozens of sources.
We integrate
Data is cleaned, matched, and unified into a single property-level dataset with lineage and versioned pipelines. Data is tiered and gated based on security requirements to enable both open and secure use.
Decision makers act
Partners and the public are able to access data either through the open data portal or through secure, custom built tools and apps to enable workflows, research and/or policy decisions.
Research
What led us here
Research
Rent Madness: Why is America's Rental Data So Bad?
The report that started it all. A deep look at why rental data is fragmented, stale, and inaccessible, and what it costs us as a country.
Read the report ↗Research
How We Used Geospatial Analysis to Understand St. Paul's Rental Market
How geospatial analysis helped map St. Paul's rental market neighborhood by neighborhood, and what it revealed about the limits of conventional data sources.
Read the report ↗Get involved
The rent data problem is too big for any one organization to solve
We're raising multi-year support to expand from our current pilot phase. If you're interested in helping grow the work of the Open Rent Initiative, we are excited to chat!
Collaboration can take many shapes, from partnering on building a comprehensive view of the rental market for your community, a tool to support an important workflow like finding preservation opportunities, or tackling a research question like identifying single family rentals.
Contact us →