About RentWatch

RentWatch reads public rental and home-price data and explains it. It never contacts landlords or posts anything anywhere.

Data sources

Zillow rental and for-sale listings. Rent, bedrooms, size, year built and price history, collected every few hours for 12 San Diego ZIP codes.
Zillow Research ZORI and ZHVI. Monthly typical rent and typical home value by ZIP, with years of history. Used for trends and forecasts.
Census ACS 5-year. Median household income and median gross rent. Shown as context, never used in a score.
OpenStreetMap. Counts of grocery stores, transit stops, parks, cafes and restaurants, and gyms per ZIP.
Census ZIP boundaries. ZCTA shapes for the map.
AB 1482 cap table. San Diego County caps by date, with sources.

How accurate are the models?

Fair-rent model: typically off by about $439 on rents it hadn't seen; 47% of those rents fell inside the 80% range (trained on 864 listings).
Forecasts: median error on the past 12 months of 1.4%, checked against a "next year equals this month" baseline on each ZIP page.

Data status: ok. Last listing update 11/14/2026, 7:02:21 PM Pacific.

What the answers are, and aren't

Rent-increase checks apply California's AB 1482 rules to the numbers you enter. Text explaining a result is written by an AI model and checked against those numbers.

Prices, forecasts and scores are estimates with ranges, based on public data. Scores never use who lives in a ZIP.

This is not legal advice. For help with a rent increase, contact the Legal Aid Society of San Diego (lassd.org, 877-534-2524).

Estimates with ranges from public data, not financial advice or measured results.