5 Real Estate Research Tools That’ll Make You a Market Expert

Real estate has evolved quite a bit over the last few decades, but one thing hasn’t changed: Consumers value agents with local expertise. In our 2025 Consumer Housing Trends Report, 75% of sellers who worked with an agent said it was highly important for the person they hired to have local knowledge about specific markets and neighborhoods. 

To help you showcase that expertise to potential clients, here are free research tools and dashboards any agent can access through Zillow.

1. Market Heat Index

Best for: Quickly taking the temperature of supply and demand in the 300 largest for-sale markets, and how conditions have evolved since 2018. 

How it works: The Market Heat Index gives you a score of 1-100. Anything 55 or above registers as a seller’s market, while 44 or below signals a buyer’s market. The score comes from three listing factors:

1. User engagement on Zillow’s active home listings
2. The share of for-sale listings with a price cut
3. The share of for-sale listings that go pending within 21 days

2. Market One-Pager

Best for: Creating an easy-to-share sheet that shows trends on home values, active listings, sales, housing costs, rents, and more. You can find data for the U.S., individual states, and specific metros. The metro-level data even breaks down home values and trends across zip codes. 

How it works: The market one-pager dashboard aggregates major economic data every month and automatically formats stats so you can see trends over time. 

3. Housing Market Snapshot

Best for: Helping clients move past dramatic headlines and understand how shopping and selling is changing as the market changes. Also useful for thinking through pricing strategies. The Housing Market Snapshot builds on the Market One-Pager and dives into details like median sale price and reasons for homeowner hesitation. You can also find heat maps for home value trends in your metro.

How it works: The dashboard collects proprietary Zillow data, such as the Zillow Home Value Index, which captures the value of the typical home overall, rather than just the homes that go on the market in a given month. The data is updated monthly.

4. Affordability Dashboard

Best for: Guiding clients to see how factors like current mortgage rates impact homeowner affordability. The Affordability Dashboard gives critical insight into questions like: Can the middle income household afford a typical home in a given market? Once someone knows what they can afford, can they find it in this market? How important and how feasible is the down payment? It’s a great way for newer agents to understand how buyers are both increasingly motivated and incredibly frustrated, finding it harder and harder to make it.

How it works: Using Zillow market data, this dashboard calculates how different financial scenarios impact consumers. For example, you can select different down payment options or different dates to see how affordability trends change. 

5. Rental & New Construction Dynamics

Best for: Staying on top of key economic trends across the for-sale, rental, and new construction markets. This provides an in-depth snapshot of everything from rental listings with concessions to construction permit activity to new home sales by stage of construction. This dashboard may be too advanced to send to clients directly, but could be very useful for agents looking to help clients navigate renting vs. buying, for example, or buying new vs. buying existing homes. 

How it works: Every month, this tool updates with a combination of Zillow data and external data from the U.S. Census Bureau. 

For more economic insights and tools, check out Zillow’s research hub.