Methodology
How the data on Realtor US is collected, what each page is built from, and how we decide which pages are worth publishing.
Data sources
| Data | Source | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| Professional name, brokerage, market city, self-description, profile photo | The professional's own public business page | Realtor profiles |
| Typical home value, 1/5/10-year change, ten-year trend | Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI), monthly | City, state and profile market sections, calculators |
| Typical rent | Zillow Observed Rent Index (ZORI) | Rent figures and rent-to-price notes |
| Population, county, elevation, time zone, coordinates | GeoNames geographical database, U.S. Census Bureau (state totals, 2020) | City facts, distances, maps |
| License regulators and state associations | State real estate commissions and associations | State and profile facts |
| City and state photos | Wikimedia Commons (credited on each page) | Page headers |
Distances, payment estimates, rent-to-price ratios and price comparisons are calculated from the figures above. Every calculation states its assumptions next to the result.
What makes a page publishable
A realtor or city page is only offered to search engines when it can show at least 5 concrete data points (for realtors, at least 3 of them must be about the professional rather than the city): for a realtor these include brokerage, the professional's own description, photo, focus areas, role, local home value, rent, county, population, nearby professionals and contact details; for a city, at least one listed professional plus local home values, trend, rent, population, county, metro area, photo and nearby professionals. Pages below the threshold stay available to visitors but are marked noindex and left out of our sitemaps.
| Today | Pages | Meet the data threshold |
|---|---|---|
| Realtor profiles | 6,435 | 4,526 |
| City pages | 2,603 | 2,247 |
Duplicates
Before publishing we compare pages with each other. When two listings describe the same business (for example two pages for one office) or their text is nearly identical, the weaker page points a canonical link to the stronger one and is not indexed. Standard service lists that are the same for every agent are not indexed either; a services page is indexed only when the business provides its own services.
How text is written
City introductions, data notes and FAQ answers are generated directly from the figures on the same page, so they change when the data changes. Profile summaries are drafted with the help of AI tools from the profile's own data; the instructions forbid inventing experience, awards, sales figures or anything not in the data, and claims a business makes about itself are attributed to it. Sentences in stored text that state distances, rankings or market figures are removed automatically, because those numbers are shown live elsewhere on the page. Guides are drafted with AI assistance from primary sources and checked before publishing. We do not use invented author profiles.
Updates and corrections
Market data is refreshed when new index releases are available; each chart shows the month it refers to. Professionals can correct or remove their profile at any time through the listing requests page. Spotted an error elsewhere? Email [email protected].