What a property is worth, and what its units should rent for

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Two questions come up constantly — what is this building worth now, and are we charging what the units are worth? The property page answers both, and it shows its workings for both. Neither costs anything: there is no data service to sign up for and nothing to switch on.

Value, from what you paid

Put the purchase price and the purchase date on the property, and Haven indexes that price forward to today using the house price index the Federal Housing Finance Agency publishes for your ZIP code. The page shows the whole calculation — what you paid, the index for your area in the year you bought, the index now, and the division — so you can put the figure in front of an owner and answer "where does this number come from", which a figure out of a black box does not let you do.

It goes down as well as up. A property bought when prices in its area were at their highest will show a number below what was paid, because that is what happened. Where the index does not reach a particular ZIP code, Haven falls back to the state figure and says on the page that it is a wider area than your property.

It is an estimate of the market, not an appraisal. It measures what prices around the property have done since you bought. It knows nothing about the building itself — a new roof or a gutted kitchen is not in it — and the page says so under the figure.

Rent position, from your own leases

A second panel puts what each unit collects beside what it would rent for, unit by unit and for the building as a whole, and gives the difference over a year as a dollar figure rather than a percentage.

The comparison is made against leases you have signed elsewhere in your own portfolio for the same layout — same bedroom and bathroom count — newest first, and only rents that were actually signed count. An asking price nobody accepted is not evidence of what the market paid. Where there are no comparable leases, the unit's own market rent is used instead, and the row says which of the two it used. The leases behind the figure are listed underneath.

An empty unit is counted as empty rather than as income, and a unit there is no figure for is listed as one that cannot be priced — which is a different thing from one already at the going rate.

What the Census Bureau and HUD say about the area

A third panel shows the median home value and the median rent by bedroom count for the ZIP code, from the American Community Survey, alongside HUD's Fair Market Rents for the same area. Both come free from the federal government.

These are area-wide figures shown for information and research only. Nothing in Haven is priced from them, and the panel says so: a median across a whole ZIP code is not evidence about one unit, and using it as though it were is how a rent ends up indefensible.