I am interested in getting aggregate dollar values for listings/sales on Zillow (for the whole country summed together, for example). Unfortunately, Zillow's data page seems to only show the "ZHVI", an index value, not a total dollar value. Is there any way to get the total dollar value?
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2This is not an economics question – tohster Feb 15 '15 at 20:29
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3I disagree, estate data can be used for economic research. There has been a lot using house prices as collateral. However, for these very specific things, the open data stack exchange might be more useful. – FooBar Feb 15 '15 at 20:49
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1@tohster You must be one of those "theoretical economists" who does not use data. – Lassie Fair Feb 15 '15 at 21:39
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@FooBar Housing prices are extremely relevant. But this is a question about how to extract data from a site. For example, I could ask "how to I get access to JSTOR in order to retrieve some economics papers". Yes, the end-result is economics-related, but the question is not. – tohster Feb 15 '15 at 21:44
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So you believe that asking how to program a Bellman iteration would be off topic on this site, too? Since it is not about economics, but rather about problems with a related tool? Anywho, this is not the place, meta would be. – FooBar Feb 15 '15 at 22:21
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@FooBar if you believe that how to data scrape Zillow is a valid question for Economics, we can simply agree to disagree because it's so far off the sniff test for me that I'm not going to spend more energy debating this. – tohster Feb 16 '15 at 01:11
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Would you like a number representing the value of housing at a moment in time using Zillow data? Or are you more interested in matching the evolution of the value of American housing with Zillow data? Because if the latter interests you, you could get something approximate by using an alternative measure of housing quantity with Zillow prices. – BKay May 07 '15 at 23:53
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To answer your question of whether you can get a number for 'total home value,' the answer is no–at least not easily.
Zillow (somewhat) recently made available a data set similar to what you are searching for. I suspect, however, that they do not want the public to have access to aggregated value because it would showcase the volatility of Zillow home value estimates, i.e. their algorithm-based estimate fluctuates much more than the estimates coming out of research institutions, etc.
Sorry for the dissatisfying answer!
Max Cramer
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They now provide values in dollars for several metrics related to median home value. For example, a graph using the data at the state level:
$\hspace{3cm}$
(code for figure here)
luchonacho
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