Exploiting New Forms of Data to Study the Private Rented Sector: Strengths and Limitations of a Database of Rental Listings

Abstract

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Housing and welfare reform, and the suburbanisation of poverty in UK cities, 2011-20

“…Zoopla listings may under-represent the bottom end of the market. Previous validation efforts suggest that Zoopla listings produce very similar estimates of median rents to the regulators' estimates (Livingston et al 2021) but this does not guarantee equal coverage of the top or bottom end.…”

“…We use a database of listings for PRS accommodation accessed under an end-user licence from the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC) which in turn licensed them from the property listings company, Zoopla Plc. The database comprises UK rental listings for 2012-20; data for earlier years appear less reliable (Livingston et al 2021). Key fields include property location (address/postcode), size (number of bedrooms) and asking rent.…”

“…The company is only one provider of rental listings, albeit a major player in the UK market. A range of efforts have been made to assess the representativeness of these data through comparisons with external sources (ONS 2018;Livingston et al 2021). These conclude that the database does appear to be a reliable guide to the spatial distribution of PRS properties at any point in time and that it can be used as a reliable source of estimates of median market rents.…”