Rental Housing Finance Survey

Sampling Unit and Unit of Analysis

The Rental Housing Finance Survey is sampled at the street address level and estimated at the property level. The addresses are sampled from a universe consisting of multi-unit buildings with a high percentage of rental units that are currently in the American Housing Survey (AHS) Primary Sampling Units (PSUs) – the same PSUs as the AHS were selected in order to use the same field staff and thus cut down on data collection costs.

Field staff during interviewing determined the addresses that made up a property. Based on this information and some additional in-house research, a factor was applied during weighting to allow for estimation at the property-level. For more details, click on "National Sample Selection, Weighting and Errors." [PDF - 174K]

Sample Size

For the National sample, slightly over 4,000 street addresses were selected for interview. For the Pittsburgh sample, slightly fewer than 1,200 street addresses were selected for interview.

Geography

For the National data, estimates are only available at the national level. Similarly for metropolitan areas, such as Pittsburgh, estimates are only available at the overall metropolitan area. Estimates at lower levels of geography are currently not available.