【Zillow】Methodology: Zillow Rent Index (2019 Update)

The Zillow Rent Index (ZRI) is a dollar-valued index intended to capture typical market rent for a given segment (IE, multifamily or single-family units) and/or geography (IE for a given ZIP code, city, county, state or metro) by leveraging Rent Zestimates. 

Historically, the ZRI was essentially calculated as the median Rent Zestimate of that segment. Recently, we revisited and updated this methodology to both better account for the stock of homes that actually rent and to capture small but important changes in rent levels. 

These changes, summarized below, have been incorporated into a new Zillow Rent Index methodology that will apply to all published ZRI data series going forward. The largest changes include:

• Reweighting to better reflect the rental housing stock
• Taking the mean of the middle quintile instead of a median

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