Brownstoner Listings Tracker Gets Underway

We are starting a new feature this week called the Brownstoner Listing Tracker (BLT). Every week we will track the number of houses listed in the New York Times classifieds by price category. The methodology is pretty simple: We go to the online real estate listings, type in the price range, and check the “House” and “Townhouse” sub-categories. Beyond that, we are going to make a good faith effort to weed out things that shouldn’t be there like condos and duplicate listings, but we’re not going to kill ourselves—those kind of errors should blance themselves out over time. Then we’ll put our rudimentary Excel graphing skills to the test. The listings are sliced into $250,000 increments except at the high and low ends; as far as labeling goes, the $1 million category, for example, includes properties listed for between $1 million and $1.249 million.

Given the recent Christmas lull, we are kicking things off by looking at January 3 versus December 13. In most of the price categories, listings appear to be down slightly, which is not surprising since a lot of brokers were on vacation last week instead of posting props. It will be interesting to see if the introduction of the open listings in Brooklyn will result in a big increase next week.

As this feature evolves, please feel free to give us your input about ways we can make it more useful, intelligible, etc.