June 1, 2026
What a metro's headline numbers hide
Population growth, job growth and median rent are the three figures every market article quotes. None of them is about the street you are buying on.
Tom Bradbury
June 1, 2026 · 1 min read
Market-level statistics are how most people choose where to buy, and they are close to useless at the scale a single house is bought at.
The scale problem
A metro is a million people. A rental house is one street, and the things that decide whether it rents well — the school boundary, the commute, whether the block is owner-occupied — vary enormously within one zip code, let alone one metro.
Two houses four miles apart, both "in a market with 3% rent growth", can have opposite outcomes. The 3% is real. It is also an average of both of them.
Three numbers that do travel down
Days on market for rentals, at the sub-market level. It is the most honest demand signal there is: how long a house like yours sits empty.
Owner-occupancy on the block. Not the metro. Streets where most houses are lived in by their owners look after themselves in a way rental-heavy streets do not.
New supply within a few miles. A large build-to-rent community delivering nearby resets asking rents for everyone, and it does not show up in a metro figure until after it has already happened.
What we publish
Everything on a Datum listing is about the property, not the metro: the rent comparables are within a tight radius, the tax figure is the county's actual assessment, and the projections run on that house's numbers.
Market articles are for deciding which city to fly to. They are not for deciding which house to buy.
