HPA graphs

The Appetizer

It wasn’t frequent amongst my set of PhD peers to work in the same field they studied, let alone continue authoring publications after graduation. In that regard, I consider myself privileged as my post-graduation role required me to do two things I am passionate for, using data science and statistics to unearth answers to real-world problems and write about it. Of course, the role didn’t quite live up to my own ideals since the job required incredibly long hours, thus hampering my more academic interests. Conflicts within leadership also led to a fair number of high-quality reports and white papers to languish in the obscurity of my work harddrive. Consequently, although this post is intended to collate my work at Amherst, it only incorporates a fraction of the output originally intended for external audiences. Still, it was fairly prolific and I am thankful for the opportunity. Okay, enough appetizer, let’s get to the meat below.

Links to external articles

Periodicals

The bulk of my output consisted of either monthly or quarterly updated on the housing market through both the Amherst Group’s platform and the Institutional Real Estate Inc platform. Below are the relevant links though I probably missed some.

IREI and Amherst work

The IREI collaboration to publish quarterly updates and occasional specials was established by Jessica Stewart who was leading Amherst’s marketing team at time. The visuals and writing were mine though the writing often went through extensive editing as it had to pass nearly 10 people’s desk, including the CEO.

Monthly update

The monthly updates and Amherst’s data platform were a big aspiration of Amherst to release some of its internal price and rent indexes in hope of becoming a thought leader and go-to source of forecasts for the housing industry. The effort was primarily spearheaded by Jessica Stewart with the data team furnishing the data and initial visualizations and me the writing. The effort kept growing in both scope and quality as the goal was to enable more interactive visualizations and even data availability to rival those of Zillow. We even hired some great folks specializing in digital marketing and visualization. Alas, it never quite reached fruition as reality hit the fan and the fiancing outlooks began to look less rosy. It isn’t exactly a coincidence that the last piece was published in 2022 tells.

Big Reports

In essence, I was brought onto the Amherst team in part to author the first piece below and the monthly updates. Of course, internal and external politics led the writing to be a bit more of a pull and tug, to the point that the final piece was co-authored with Laurie Goodman at the Urban Institute.

Market Outlooks

The annual market outlooks were whole team efforts and co-authored by my peers and me. It mostly incorporated contemporaneous work on top of boiler-plate market data.