Zillow Mortgage Payment
A monthly estimate of the mortgage payment on the typical home in an area, published by Zillow for metro areas and counties from a modeled combination of home value and prevailing mortgage rates.
The monthly payment a buyer would owe on the typical home in an area, estimated from a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Zillow starts from its own typical-home-value estimate and the prevailing mortgage rate, where "mortgage rates are given by the monthly average of rates from the Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey" (Methodology: Affordability Metrics), and adds mortgage insurance where the assumed down payment falls short of 20%.
This is a different measure from the Zillow Home Value Index. A home value is a price; a payment is what that price costs to carry every month, and the same price carries a different payment depending on the mortgage rate at the time. The value can hold steady while the payment moves sharply on rate changes alone, which is the dimension this source adds that a price index cannot show on its own.
Coverage#
Monthly values from January 2012 through the most recent release, at two geographies: metropolitan and micropolitan areas, and counties. History here starts twelve years later than the Zillow Home Value Index, and the region set is smaller — the payment series covers roughly 389 metro areas against the price index's 894, because Zillow builds the payment series only where it has enough sales activity to support the calculation.
Zillow revises history with each monthly release, alongside the mortgage rate and home value inputs it is built from.
Geography#
The files are published for whole metro areas and counties and are used at those grains directly: a county figure is Zillow's county figure, unmodified. Zillow publishes no ZIP code, city, or neighborhood file for this series, so county is the finest geography this source will ever reach — unlike the Zillow Home Value Index, which descends to ZIP code and is assembled onto census tracts from there. No tract-level figure is built from this source, for the same reason.
Other considerations#
The figure is a model output, not an observed payment. It describes what a buyer purchasing the typical home today, at the prevailing rate and an assumed down payment, would owe — not what any actual borrower in the area currently pays, since most homeowners locked in a rate at a different time under different terms. Two Zillow inputs feed the calculation: "the typical home price is given by the Zillow Home Value Index (ZHVI)," and mortgage insurance of 1% is added when the down payment is below 20% (Methodology: Affordability Metrics).
The figure is nominal and not adjusted for inflation. It is sensitive to mortgage rate swings in a way a home-value index is not, so a change in this series can reflect financing conditions rather than any change in what homes are worth.
Metrics built on this source#
Citation#
Data Provided by Zillow Group
Zillow's terms permit non-personal use of the aggregate data, including derivative works, provided the Zillow Companies are credited on every page displaying the data, no Zillow logo is shown, and no relationship or endorsement is implied (Zillow Group Terms of Use). Figures derived from this source are our own; Zillow is not responsible for our calculations.
References#
- 1Zillow Research Datahttps://www.zillow.com/research/data/
- 2Methodology: Affordability Metricshttps://www.zillow.com/research/affordability-methodology-34975/
- 3Zillow Group Terms of Usehttps://www.zillowgroup.com/developers/api/public-data/real-estate-metrics/