The Single-Family Residential REITs Data Guide (2026)

Two agencies supply the official numbers. The U.S. Census Bureau's Housing Vacancies and Homeownership (CPS/HVS) program publishes quarterly rental and homeowner vacancy rates and homeownership rates for the nation, four census regions, all 50 states and the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas — 11 detail tables per release, historical vacancy tables reaching back to 1956, and a free-keyed Census API series. Its latest release landed July 28, 2026, covering Q2 2026. FHFA's House Price Index Datasets add repeat-sales appreciation at monthly frequency for the United States and nine census divisions and quarterly for states, 100 largest metros, counties, three- and five-digit ZIP codes and census tracts, anchored by a master CSV measuring 17,046,224 bytes (~17 MB) holding over 90,000 observations across 12 variables.

Four of the five primaries trace to the federal government; the fifth is the trade-association layer that names the listed companies themselves.

The brief behind this slice maps ten recurring jobs, each tied to a named dataset.

1. Gauge rent-pricing power quarter by quarter with Census CPS/HVS rental vacancy rates for the nation, four census regions, all states and the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas.
2. Project single-family rental demand from HVS homeownership rates broken out by age of householder, race/ethnicity, family status and units-in-structure.
3. Underwrite appreciation and mark portfolios to market with FHFA's monthly purchase-only House Price Index from January 1991 alongside all-transactions series reaching to the mid-1970s.
4. Score submarket acquisitions on FHFA's three- and five-digit ZIP code series and annual census tract indexes from 1998, spanning the 100 largest metros standard and 410 in expanded data.
5. Run rent-versus-buy analyses pairing HVS tenure shifts with FHFA home-price trends to anticipate tenant conversion and retention.
6. Build a listed-REIT comp set from the Nareit REIT Directory's roughly 222 member profiles carrying ticker, exchange, property type, market cap and dividend fields.
7. Surface state, county, city and tribal housing records beyond the federal series by mining Data.gov's 552,271-dataset catalog with keyword and bounding-box searches.
8. Backtest multi-decade strategies on HVS historical tables reaching to 1956 and FHFA series to the mid-1970s, both commercial delivery terms.
9. Drop citable visuals into client decks using the eight Census HVS PDF charts, which trace vacancy and homeownership from 1968 to the present.
10. Enrich quarterly summaries with American Housing Survey national microdata for the unit-level characteristics the aggregate tables collapse.

Two of Datadory's persona hubs cut straight across this slice, and their search behavior shows what each role actually types.

market researchers work the same free core from the sizing side. Of the 1,744 cataloged datasets, 786 rate as strongly relevant for their work, 665 of those (84.6%) are completely free — beating the 82.4% catalog share — and 590 (75.1%) score 8-plus on quality. Their queries skew commercial: "rental vacancy rate by metro" to judge local rent pressure across the 75 largest MSAs, "reit market cap and dividends" for comparable size-and-payout fields across the roughly 222 listed profiles, and "federal housing datasets catalog search" for the query patterns and bounding-box filters that locate niche state and city files.

Three further phrasings recur in the slice's own use-case map. Underwriters and consultants search "historical home prices by county" for FHFA's quarterly county trend lines. Demographic researchers ask for "homeownership rate by age group" to project first-time-buyer leakage into rentals from HVS age-of-householder breakouts. Screeners type "list of publicly traded reits" — the Nareit directory's ~222 names with tickers, exchanges and property types — and analysts assembling decks lean on "census housing vacancies survey tables" for direct links to the 11 quarterly detail tables and their CSV extracts.

A working stack falls out of the access patterns above, and none of the first five steps needs budget.

Six comparisons place this slice inside the full catalog: