About the site
County-level housing data, written in plain language.
HomesByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the housing statistics that the federal government already collects — median home values, rent prices, property taxes, affordability ratios — for every one of America's 3,100+ counties.
What HomesByCounty Is
HomesByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a real-estate brokerage or financial advisor. Our purpose is to take county-level housing statistics published by the U.S. Census Bureau and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to move, evaluating housing affordability in a region you're considering, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates and Zillow Home Value Index data. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs HomesByCounty
HomesByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to the automated pipeline that ingests public datasets from the U.S. Census Bureau, Zillow, and other sources, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a licensed real-estate agent, mortgage broker, or financial advisor, and HomesByCounty does not present itself as a source of financial or real-estate advice. We do not broker homes, originate loans, or recommend specific properties. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying confidence intervals, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built HomesByCounty
I started HomesByCounty after trying to understand housing affordability and home values across counties and finding the data scattered across sources. The Census Bureau publishes extraordinary data through the American Community Survey, but it is buried in spreadsheets and technical documentation. Zillow has rich market data, but it is organized around listings, not counties. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on home values, rent prices, and affordability — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, composite-score formula, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
HomesByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with the U.S. Census Bureau, Zillow, or any government agency. We use public datasets under the licenses they publish — for federal works, that is public-domain release. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to a state housing agency or to Zillow for active listings — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, investment recommendations, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on a YMYL site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
HomesByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, weather, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@homesbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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