New Sales, Listings, Absorption Rate and Volatility Endpoints that Unlock Novel Insights in Your Market. API Product Release 0.7.0 Blog

0.7.0 API Update: New Sales, Listings, Absorption Rate and Volatility Endpoints and a Market Endpoint Refactor

Currently, inventory constraints and market volatility are prominent topics of interest in the real estate sector. Traditional data sources for monitoring this information are delayed and inconsistent.

At Parcl Labs, our aim is to provide you with the most timely, accurate, and dependable insights, empowering you to navigate the real estate market with confidence. With the launch of version 0.7.0, we are presenting the first in a series of in-house developed metrics designed to analyze real estate supply and demand dynamics more effectively than traditional sources.

Today's release marks the beginning of our endeavor, with the addition of five new endpoints to our API: historical and current sales, active on-market listings, absorption rate, and the real estate volatility index.

With these new endpoints, you can now:

1. Get real time active inventory counts that represent the full coverage of listings in your market, not just from one source
2. Track real estate transactions over time of the market level, to understand if your market is speeding up or slowing down
3. Gain insights into supply and demand dynamics with accurate real time absorption rates
4. Look at your real estate market through a different lens by tracking the new Parcl Labs real estate volatility index over time for all markets available on the API

Ready to get started? Let’s dive in.

Introducing the Current Active Listings Endpoint

With the current active listings endpoint, you can now access the current active listings in your market based on the amount of unique properties that have been listed, on any major listings site, in the past 30 days. The current endpoint returns the most recent listings data available, showing a more complete picture of housing inventory than any one listings site can represent.

How can you access current active listings?

The current active listings endpoint is accessible at the Parcl Labs documentation site. If you need to register for an API account, start here with our Quickstart guide.

Overview of the metrics returned by current active listings

The current active listings response object includes the parcl_id, unique active listings in the last 30 days for the specified market and the date.

 
{
  "parcl_id": 2900187,
  "listings": {
    "date": "2023-05-15",
    "listings_30_day": 52525
  }
}

Use the Current Active Listings Endpoint to get the Holistic View of Inventory

Users can leverage this endpoint to get the true counts of active listings in your market, and dive deeper to see where these listings actually are. See this example recipe to learn how to use this new endpoint with python to get the breakdown of active listings in NYC broken out by Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Introducing the Current and Historical Sales Endpoints

We’re excited to introduce the new sales endpoints, both current and historical. With the sales  endpoints, you can now access the count of unique sales that occurred in your market over the past 30 days. The historical endpoint goes back to 1/1/2020, with each day returning a count of unique sales that occurred in the previous 30 days.

How can you access current and historical sales?

The current sales endpoint is accessible at the Parcl Labs documentation site. The historical sales endpoint is accessible at the Parcl Labs documentation site as well. If you need to register for an API account, start here with our Quickstart guide.

Overview of the metrics returned by current and historical sales

The current sales object includes the parcl_id, unique sale in the last 30 days for the specified market and the date.

 
{
  "parcl_id": 2900187,
  "sales": {
    "date": "2023-05-14",
    "sales_30_day": 10088
  }
}

The historical sales object includes the parcl_id, and an array of rolling sale data dating back to 1/1/2020. Each object in the array provides data for a specific date, including the number of unique sales that occurred within the 30 days leading up to that date.

 
{
  "parcl_id": 2900187,
  "historical_sales": [
    {
      "date": "2023-05-14",
      "sales_30_day": 10088
    },
    {
      "date": "2023-05-13",
      "sales_30_day": 10835
    },
		...
    {
      "date": "2020-01-02",
      "sales_30_day": 12055
    },
    {
      "date": "2020-01-01",
      "sales_30_day": 12511
    }
	]
}

Use the Historical Sales Endpoint Identify Trends over Time

Users can leverage the historical endpoint to derive deeper insights around listings over time. Those in the know are aware that the real estate market is cyclical, but are sales rising at the same rate this summer as they did last year? See this example recipe to learn how to use this new endpoint with python to derive year over year sales insights in New York:

Introducing the Current Absorption Rate Endpoint

With the current absorption rate endpoint, you can now access the current absorption rate in your market based on the daily counts of sales in the past 30 days over the current amount of active listings in the past 30 days, allowing users to understand the rate at which inventory is selling. The current endpoint returns the most recent absorption rate data available.

How can you access current active listings?

The current active listings endpoint is accessible at the Parcl Labs documentation site. If you need to register for an API account, start here with our Quickstart guide.

Overview of the metrics returned by current active listings

The current active listings response object includes the parcl_id, current absorption rate for the specified market and the date.

 
{
  "parcl_id": 2900187,
  "absorption_rate": {
    "absorption_rate": 0.19,
    "date": "2023-05-14"
  }
}

Introducing the Volatility Index Endpoint

We’re excited to introduce the new volatility index (VIX) endpoint. With the VIX endpoint, you can now analyze how volatile their market has been going back to 6/1/2020.

The American residential real estate market has been experiencing one of the most volatile moments in recent history thanks to a variety of factors ranging from economic conditions, inflation and raising interest rates. This creates challenges for investors and analysts trying to identify the best investment opportunities. To address this issue, we are pleased to introduce the Price Feed Volatility endpoint.

By using the Price Feed Volatility metric, real estate professionals can make well-informed decisions regarding potential investments. The endpoint is designed to help our users adjust their investment strategies as necessary to optimize risk and reward.

How can you access the volatility endpoint?

The current volatility endpoint is accessible at the Parcl Labs documentation site. If you need to register for an API account, start here with our Quickstart guide.

Overview of the metrics returned by the volatility endpoint

To compute the Price Feed Volatility metric, we first calculate the daily returns of the PLPF for a given market, and then apply a rolling standard deviation to account for idiosyncrasies and sparsity specific to that market. After the window has been set and the rolling standard deviation has been calculated we annualized this metric to better estimate the expected volatility of the investment over a full year. This commonly-used risk metric provides a measure of the degree of variation or dispersion of a set of data from its mean, and in the context of real estate markets, it enables investors and analysts to assess the level of risk associated with a particular market accurately.

This results in a volatility index response object that includes the parcl_id, and an array of daily volatility dating back to 6/1/2020:

 
{
	"parcl_id": 2900187,
  "volatility": [
    {
      "date": "2023-05-14",
      "volatility": 0.035862
    },
    {
      "date": "2023-05-13",
      "volatility": 0.037123
    },
		...
    {
      "date": "2020-06-02",
      "volatility": 0.038732
    },
    {
      "date": "2020-06-01",
      "volatility": 0.037855
    }
	]
}

Use the Volatility Endpoint View your Market Through a New Lens

This new tool provides a reliable way to track variations in the returns of real estate markets using the Parcl Labs Price Feed (PLPF), which is a real-time data feed that captures the latest prices in a given real estate market, as its underlying metric. See this example recipe to learn how to use this new endpoint with python to analyze volatility over time in several markets:

Refactored Markets Endpoint

We've also made significant improvements to our markets endpoint, which now includes Census designated regions, state FIPS codes, and full state names. These changes are backwards compatible with the existing markets response object, so you can easily integrate the new data into your existing workflows. The updated response object:

 
{
    "parcl_id": 2900142,
    "location_type": "MSA",
    "name": "Mobile",
    "state": "AL",
    "state_name": "Alabama",
    "state_fips_code": "01",
    "census_region": "East South Central"
}

We hope these new features and improvements will help you make more informed decisions about real estate investment and analysis. If you have any questions or feedback. Happy analyzing!