Housing Market Index (HMI)

The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, a monthly 0-100 gauge of homebuilder sentiment published for the nation and the four Census regions since January 1985.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - NAHB Housing Economics — "the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (builder sentiment 0-100)".

Conventions decide whether two sources can be joined at all. Buy one side of an analysis that ignores this convention and every reconciliation step — calendar alignment, unit conversion, entity matching — lands on your team instead of the vendor's.

The failure mode is concrete: a source can carry the Housing Market Index (HMI) label while differing from what you need on exactly the dimension that matters — the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (builder sentiment 0-100). Comparing two sources on that line usually settles the choice faster than any feature matrix.

You rarely have to take a vendor's word for it. 82.4% of the 1,744 datasets Datadory catalogs are free to access, and NAHB Housing Economics lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open NAHB Housing Economics and confirm its record — "the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (builder sentiment 0-100)" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Pin down update cadence in writing. Across this catalog, 22.6% of 1,744 datasets refresh daily and 64 still arrive only through a manual request form, so ask exactly how fresh each release is.
3. Check whether definitions are verified at all. Field definitions are verified for 1495 of 1,744 datasets (85.7%), and any source you license should meet that bar.
4. Price the delivery route before the license. In this catalog bulk download is the most common access method (725 datasets) ahead of official APIs (574), and 379 sources still require scraping — a maintenance cost that lands on you, not the vendor.

See the term applied to real records: homebuilding data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - builder trade association data - framing lumber prices - housing starts