Appraiser Jonathan Miller’s relationship with Douglas Elliman is coming to a close after 32 years.
The head of the Miller Samuel appraisal firm and author of the market reports published with the brokerage’s branding on contracts, sales and rentals in the nation’s major markets, announced Wednesday that the Feb. 12 report would be his last under the partnership.
The reports grew to include housing metrics in the New York City Metro area, the Mid-Atlantic, parts of Florida, Texas, Colorado and Southern California, Miller said in an email announcing his departure, adding that he spent “48 percent of my life” on the Elliman Reports.
“The report series approached each housing market as a research project, not as a marketing brochure,” Miller wrote. “What made the report series unique was that our team delivered the housing market narrative to a diverse audience, including real estate agents, consumers, mortgage lenders, academics, government officials, the legal profession, and others. The goal was to create a neutral benchmark to help report readers make more informed decisions.”
Now, Miller says the brokerage has new plans for the report.
“Douglas Elliman tells me they are already working hard on a replacement for the current Elliman Report series to continue their long-term commitment to enable market participants to make informed real estate decisions,” Miller wrote.
Elliman CEO Michael Liebowitz echoed that plan in an internal note to agents, writing that the brokerage is launching a new data report program that will “capture the unique nuances of every market in which we operate,” for agents, media and consumers.
Miller, who also works as a consultant and an adjunct professor at Columbia University, said he will now focus primarily on a housing data venture. Along with economist Nick Huntington-Klein, Miller announced the launch of StreetMatrix in September, billing its neighborhood-level housing index, which features data down to bedroom count and neighborhood, as an industry first.
The platform kicked off its offering of market reports with statewide data from California and its major markets, according to its website.
The index, which is backed by recorded sales data, will measure market performance over time with factors such as price, supply, number of transactions and days on market, which Miller and the team retrospectively verified with data going back to before the Great Recession.
“What most housing indexes do is look at an entire city as one entity,” Miller told The Real Deal at the time. “Having worked in housing, authored reports and appraised for a long time, we learned that there are many layers and sections of a market. We wanted to capture that and not make that mistake.”
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