The subject property
What the report is pricing
A three-bedroom, two-bathroom single-family house of about 1,400 square feet in good condition, with off-street parking and in-unit laundry. Long-term lease.
Where the property is a duplex, fourplex or larger, this section becomes a table with one row per unit, so the units can be read across and compared rather than down four near-identical lists. Each unit then gets its own estimate further down.
The Kingston, NY rental market
Public data for the property's census tract
The report opens with the market the property sits in, so the estimate arrives with context rather than needing to be explained after the fact. Everything in this section comes from public sources at no cost, and every one of them is optional: if a source is unreachable when your report is built, that part is left out rather than guessed at.
- Renter households, median gross rent and vacancy for the tract, from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey.
- A rent trend line across five ACS releases. Consecutive five-year estimates share four years of data, so the line is smoothed and lags by a year or two — the report says so where it draws it.
- HUD Fair Market Rent for the bedroom counts the property actually has.
- A short written outline of the market — supply, what is being asked, employers, transit and new construction.
Market rate analysis
The estimate, and the reasoning behind it
Most likely rent
$2,100 / month
Supported range $2,000 – $2,175 · Confidence: medium
About $250 a month above the $1,850 currently charged, or roughly $3,000 a year.
The comparison against your current rent only appears when you told us what it is. It is worked out afterwards in code, and the figure is never shown to the model that produces the estimate — a stated current rent pulls an estimate toward itself, which would make the tool agree with whatever you already charge.
Why this number
The middle of the five same-bedroom comparables below is $2,050. The subject has two full bathrooms where the cheapest active listing has one and a half, and in-unit laundry where that listing has none, which places it above rather than beside it. At 1,400 square feet it sits mid-pack on size, so no size adjustment applies. The one comparable that actually leased went at $1,850 two months ago, which sets a floor rather than a target.
Confidence is worked out in code from what could be verified — how many comparables survived de-duplication, how many are genuinely current, how many could be placed on a map, and how far the nearest verified one is. It is not the model's own opinion of its answer.
Comparable rentals
Six listings, with what we could verify about each
| # | Distance | Drive | Beds | Baths | Size | Rent | $/sq ft | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.3 mi | 2 min | 3 | 2 | 1,380 | $2,050 | 1.49 | |
| 2 | 0.5 mi | 3 min | 3 | 2 | 1,520 | $2,195 | 1.44 | |
| 3 | 0.7 mi | 4 min | 3 | 1.5 | 1,300 | $1,925 | 1.48 | |
| 4 | 0.9 mi | 4 min | 3 | 2 | 1,450 | $2,100 | 1.45 | |
| 5 | 1.2 mi | 6 min | 4 | 2 | 1,760 | $2,350 | 1.34 | |
| 6 | 1.4 mi | 11 min | 3 | 2 | 1,390 | $1,850 | 1.33 | Leased 2 mo ago |
Four things about this table are worth knowing, because they are the parts that took the longest to get right.
The distances are measured, not claimed
Every comparable address is geocoded and its distance from the property calculated, rather than taken as reported. This matters more than it sounds: two fixed points have exactly one distance between them, which makes it the one attribute that can be checked for free — and checking it found reported figures that were wrong by miles. Since the derivation weights comparables by how close they are, a wrong distance moves the answer.
Drive time is there because a map cannot see a highway
Two houses four hundred metres apart with a limited-access highway between them do not compete for the same tenant. Comparable 6 above is 1.4 miles away and eleven minutes' drive, which is the kind of gap a straight-line figure hides. It is a measurement of travel cost and nothing more.
Listing status is shown when it is not current
A comparable that leased months ago is evidence of a different kind than one asking today, so the report labels it. Current listings carry no label, because that is what a reader already assumes and labelling every row would cost the distinction its meaning. Where a comparable's status could not be established it is treated as historical, which is the cautious end.
Stale comparables are kept and flagged
Filtering to current listings only would sometimes cut a six-comparable set to one and leave the report with no explanation for why. Showing the whole set with the older entries marked lets you weigh them, and the source link for each one is there so you can open it.
What is nearby
The closest of each, with a measured travel time
Fifteen categories are searched and the closest of each is reported, up to eight rows. The winner in each category is chosen on travel time rather than straight-line distance, because the nearest thing is not always the quickest to reach.
A category with nothing mapped near the property is left out rather than shown as a zero, because an absence in the underlying map data means nobody has mapped it, which is a different thing from it not being there. Park and campus distances are measured to the nearest edge rather than the centre of a bounding box, which on a large park is the difference between "across the street" and "a mile away".
Housing Choice Voucher
What HUD's figure is, and what it is not
The report prints the Fair Market Rent for the bedroom counts the property has, with two caveats stated next to it, because leaving either out would make the figure misleading.
- Fair Market Rent is a gross rent, meaning it includes utilities the tenant pays. The estimate above is contract rent, so the two are not read straight against each other.
- It is not the payment standard. The local public housing authority sets that between 90 and 110 per cent of Fair Market Rent and then deducts a utility allowance, so the figure that governs a specific tenancy has to come from them.
It sits around the fortieth percentile of the local market, which makes it a reasonable floor and a poor target. More on why Fair Market Rent reads as a floor.
Your next move
Written for the reader the report actually has
The closing section changes depending on who is reading. Plenty of people run this on a building they are considering buying rather than one they own, and "phase in the increase" means nothing to them. So it splits: guidance for an owner with a tenant in place and a gap to close, guidance for someone evaluating a purchase, and guidance for a multi-unit building where the units diverge.
How the report reaches you
One link, no attachment
Run an estimate and the range and the point estimate appear on the page straight away. The full report — the comparables, the maps, the market data, the travel times and the reasoning — arrives by email as a link to a page like this one, with a PDF you can download from it.
That link is unguessable and it is meant to be forwarded, to a spouse, a business partner or an accountant, which is why the report is a page rather than a file. It is not indexed and it is excluded from crawlers, and it never shows the email address it was sent to.
Run this on your own property
Enter an address and the unit details. The estimate takes under two minutes to request, and the full report follows by email.
Estimate market rentWorking out the number by hand instead? How much should I charge for rent walks through the same method with a free comparison worksheet.