The housing market has been in the news pretty regularly over the past few years, so today we thought we'd take a look at a few of our favorite resources for researching the housing market.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of the Treasury produce a monthly scorecard for the nation's housing market. These reports cover all kinds of things including new and existing home sales, mortgage rates and refinancing statistics, housing supply, number of mortgage delinquency rates and more. In addition to the monthly scorecards, they also produce spotlight reports on specific cities.
Since 1997, Harvard University has been releasing "The State of the Nation's Housing". This is an amazing amount of information on the housing market put together by Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies."The Joint Center uses current data from the US Census Bureau, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Pew Research Center, the Conference Board, the Energy Information Administration, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, the Federal Reserve, CoreLogic, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Moody’s Economy. com, the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, MPF Research, the National Association of Realtors®, the National Council of Real Estate Investment Fiduciaries, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the National Multi Housing Council, Standard and Poor’s, Lender Processing Services, and Zillow.com to develop its findings." What a great one-stop-shop. Convenient and free!
The Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University offers market reports for all 25 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in Texas and covers "census data, employment and unemployment, major industries, business climate, education, transportation and infrastructure issues, growth patterns and much more." It's pretty common for universities to offer this type of information, so a quick Google search for your home state's universities would probably yield similar results.
The National Association of Realtors has a great Research & Statistics page with a quick reference Housing Indicators section as well as a more in depth Market Intelligence section which includes Local Market Reports for several big cities, state employment trends, home price monitors and more.
We love Wolfram Alpha for all kinds of research as you can see here, so it's no surprise that they're a great resource for information on the housing market. In addition to offering demographic zip code information you can also see median home prices for the city of your choice or use it to compare cities.