Sr. Economist

Sr. Economist

Requirements

• Degree in statistics, economics, computer science or a related area. Masters/PhD or similar degree preferred.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in applied data science and/or economic research (real estate or housing experience preferred).
• Proven track record analyzing large amounts of data and crafting data-driven stories
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal including: The ability to boil complex questions and data analysis down to relevant and actionable insights, Strong media presence including live television and audio and large group presentation skills to both industry and consumer audiences, with interest in further developing these skills, Ability to convey difficult subjects and ideas in sound bites that the average layperson can understand and attract media attention
• Excellent research and analytic skills to support inferential and causal market analysis and forecasting.
• Coding ability and intimacy with the data science toolkit in an applied context (R, Python, Pandas, NumPy, SQL).
• Deep understanding of time series modeling and related statistical techniques (e.g. ARIMA, exponential smoothing, time series regression methods etc.)
• Experience with cloud and big data technologies to extract and analyze data (Snowflake, S3, Redshift, Athena, Hive, BigQuery, Spark, etc).
• Familiarity with housing and economic datasets a strong plus (i.e. demographic data such as Census, Claritas and economic time series data such as provided by Moody’s Analytics and micro data such as IPUMS and other loan-level mortgage databases).
• Experience building ETL pipelines (e.g. Airflow, DBT) and productionalizing models, nice to have.
• Strong collaborator with the ability to work independently and cross-functionally.

Responsibilities

• Work with other members of the Economics team and other data teams to extract key trends impacting residential real estate, blending Realtor.com’s proprietary data with relevant data from industry, government, and partners.
• Collaborate with internal communication, research, and reporting teams and partners on topical research projects that can be leveraged to generate content for realtor.com® | Homes for Sale, Apartments & Houses for Rent audiences and drive realtor.com® | Homes for Sale, Apartments & Houses for Rent share of voice. This includes data analysis, report and article authorship, and interviews for print, online and broadcast media.
• Serve as an expert company spokesperson to media and to industry stakeholders on specific research studies, market statistics, and realtor.com® | Homes for Sale, Apartments & Houses for Rent’s point of view on the latest housing market & economic trends.
• Contribute to the roadmap for innovative economic insights and data products, publish unique content on Realtor.com® Research – Housing Data & Real Estate Market Trends and realtor.com/news, including regular and ad-hoc reporting, and drive ideas for future analyses.
• Build econometric models to help explain and predict housing market conditions, including time-series, causality and machine learning methods.
• Collaborate with analysts, researchers and engineers to construct and automate economic data series, proprietary indices, and other market insights.
• Extract data, conduct complex analyses, and communicate results such that they can be easily understood by key audiences with varying degrees of housing market knowledge; audiences include: internal decision makers, home buyers, home sellers, real estate professionals, and the media.
• Lead short-fused research projects and deliver results under tight constraints.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building ETL pipelines (e.g. Airflow, DBT) and productionalizing models, nice to have.