MSA-level estimates

Metropolitan statistical area granularity: the CPS/HVS publishes quarterly vacancy and homeownership estimates for the 75 largest MSAs, while FHFA HPI covers the 100 largest metros (410 in expanded-data) — the market-level cut single-family rental operators underwrite against.

In this catalog it appears concretely: - census-housing-vacancies-and-homeownership-cps-hvs — "the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas, and metro/non-metro breakdowns". - fhfa-house-price-index-datasets — "100 largest metropolitan areas (410 metros in expanded-data)".

A table is only as good as the column you actually need. If this field is absent, sparsely populated or defined inconsistently across rows, no amount of surrounding richness rescues the analysis, so it deserves its own line in your evaluation checklist.

The failure mode is concrete: a source can carry the MSA-level estimates label while differing from what you need on exactly the dimension that matters — the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas, and metro/non-metro breakdowns. 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 census-housing-vacancies-and-homeownership-cps-hvs lets you inspect the real artifact before any budget is committed.

Treat every claim of this attribute as testable:

1. Open census-housing-vacancies-and-homeownership-cps-hvs and confirm its record — "the 75 largest metropolitan statistical areas, and metro/non-metro breakdowns" — against the files you actually receive.
2. Open fhfa-house-price-index-datasets and confirm its record — "100 largest metropolitan areas (410 metros in expanded-data)" — against the files you actually receive.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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: single-family-residential-reits data.

Adjacent concepts worth reading next: - expanded data hpi - Rental vacancy rate - zip code level index