Vacancy Data

Why is vacancy data important? 

Long-term vacancy is measured by the share of residential addresses that have been vacant for at least two years. High levels of long-term vacancy, relative to other geographies, are an indicator of weak market demand and can be interpreted as an approximation of the degree of property-related blight in a neighborhood. As of 2015, IHS no longer publicly releases updates of these data due to irregularities quarter to quarter at the data source.  

IHS has used tract-level long-term vacancy data in our Data Clearinghouse to:

• Examine patterns of residential vacancy for the City of Chicago’s Five-Year Housing Plan
• Explore policy responses to the issue of long-term vacancy in Cook County

Because source data is at the census-tract level, aggregated data are available on the IHS Data Portal only for subregions of Cook County and City of Chicago community areas, which are geographies coterminous with census tracts. To allow for analysis of trends in long-term vacancy to be examined over time, data is available quarterly from 2010 to the most recent quarter. 

Because source data is at the census-tract level, aggregated data are available on the IHS Data Portal only for metro area counties, subregions of Cook County, and City of Chicago community areas, which are geographies coterminous with census tracts. To allow for analysis of trends in long-term vacancy to be examined over time, data is available quarterly from 2010 to the most recent quarter. 

Due to observed volatility in the data quarter-to-quarter within a geography, these data are best used to compare vacancy levels across geographies within a time period or within a geography over longer periods of time.

Subtypes available on the IHS Data Portal

• Share of Residential Addresses Vacant for 24 Months or More. The share of residential addresses that have been vacant for 24 or more months is available through the most recent quarter. 

About the Data

Data on vacancy is collected by the United States Postal Service and made available by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to qualified recipients at the census tract level. The underlying data is collected by postal workers and submitted to HUD on a quarterly basis and includes data on the total number of residential and business addresses, and the number of addresses that have been vacant for different, set increments of time. Addresses that have been identified by a postal worker as unlikely to become occupied for a significant amount of time are recorded separately as a “no-stat” address. In previous years IHS has provided a separate data set on long-term vacancy that includes “no-stat” addresses. Significant fluctuations on a quarterly basis of “no-stat” addresses have been linked to newly created PO boxes, which obscure the application of the data. In 2014, as part of IHS’s 2013 data update this data set was removed. You can learn more about how vacancy data is collected and how IHS has used these data to create this housing market indicator here. As noted above, as of 2015, IHS no longer publicly releases updates of these data due to irregularities quarter to quarter at the data source.