Updater Announces Relocation Trends Data Partnership with National Association of REALTORS®

By Jenna Weinerman

Published Jun 9, 2021

Updated Dec 21, 2023

We’re thrilled to announce a new layer to our partnership with The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR), America’s largest trade association with more than 1.4 million members, to supply the association with anonymous, aggregated relocation data. NAR will utilize Updater’s unique and comprehensive real-time, pre-move data — which leverages our hundreds of real estate partnerships across brokerage, mortgage, multifamily, and more — to inform its trend forecasting and reporting efforts, empowering its members with actionable insights they can’t get anywhere else.

David Greenberg, Updater’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, stated, “Real-time insight into relocation trends and forecasts will allow NAR’s REALTOR® members to leverage new, sophisticated tools to serve their clients. Moreover, NAR’s ability to access pre-move data for the first time will only further establish the organization as the housing industry leader that consumers trust most. We look forward to continuing to deepen our long-standing relationship.”

Per the partnership, NAR members will receive access to both national and local moving developments, including exclusive, REALTOR®-only content. In addition to member-facing trend forecasts, NAR will leverage Updater data to publish public-facing thought leadership content for consumers, offering relocation trends and market insights in real-time. The data will be credited to Updater and published on NAR’s economics blog as well as on an internal portal for members, where it plans to create a separate section detailing the following month’s moving trends to stay ahead of rapidly shifting information. Specific data will include:

Proprietary pre-move timing data
Home ownership vs. rentals
Origin and destination home size
Origin and destination addresses
First-time homeownership identification

“We are very pleased to have access to data trends related to migration patterns across the country. The information is much timelier than government data on population movements. Therefore, the use of Updater proprietary information will provide invaluable research about changes in residential location and of housing demand at the local level,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist.

Updater has a lengthy history with NAR and was part of its inaugural REach program, an accelerator created in partnership with its early-stage technology fund Second Century Ventures – which has made two strategic investments in Updater. NAR is the most prominent economics team to utilize Updater’s relocation data thus far, further validating its accuracy compared to other available sources.

Updater’s data is unique in that it comprises fully verified movers. This eliminates outdated and inaccurate statistics that occur when tabulating mail forwarding forms, which by definition are not real-time, and excludes moves that are not designated as permanent. Updater data also comprises deeper and richer data points, including homeownership vs. renting, move distance, mover demographics and psychographics, move timing, and more. Updater also engages movers weeks prior to a move, meaning its data can be used to predict with greater accuracy where people are migrating in the U.S.