Sr. Economist

Realtor.com is seeking a Sr. Economist on the Economics Research team with expertise in data-driven storytelling to a variety of audiences, strong analytic instincts, and skills to build models from large data. The purpose of this role will be to deliver insights to the team and its public and internal stakeholders derived from analyzing housing, economic, and consumer data. The role will report to the Chief Economist.

What you’ll do:

• 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.

How we work:

We balance creativity and innovation on a foundation of in-person collaboration. For most roles, our employees work three or more days in our offices, where they have the opportunity to collaborate in-person, adding richness to our culture and knitting us closer together.

What you’ll bring: 

• 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

How we Reward you:

Realtor.com is committed to investing in the health and wellbeing of our employees and their families. Our benefits programs include, but are not limited to:

• Inclusive and Competitive medical, Rx, dental, and vision coverage
• Family forming benefits
• 13 Paid Holidays
• Flexible Time Off
• 8 hours of paid Volunteer Time off
• Immediate eligibility into Company 401(k) plan with 3.5% company match
• Tuition Reimbursement program for degreed and non-degreed programs
• 1:1 personalized Financial Planning Sessions
• Student Debt Retirement Savings Match program
• Free snacks and refreshments in each office location

At Realtor, we recognize that attracting the best talent is key to our strategy and success as a company.  As a result, we aim for flexibility in structuring competitive compensation offers to ensure we are able to attract the best candidates.

The quoted salary range represents our good faith estimate as to what our ideal candidates are likely to expect in the listed locations. We tailor our offers based on the selected candidate’s experience, industry knowledge, technical and communication skills, location and other factors that may prove relevant during the interview process.  All ranges are location based, ranges for positions in other locations may vary based on the local market.

Salary Range for select office locations

• New York $135,000.00 - $196,100.00

Pay-for-performance is a key element in our strategy to attract, engage, and motivate talented people to do their best work. Accordingly, offers extended for this role will include an annual bonus target typically expressed as percentage of salary.  Similarly to salary, annual incentive bonus targets are set based on a variety of factors including job level, competitive market practice, experience, tenure, and essential skills.

In addition to cash compensation, the company provides a comprehensive and highly competitive benefits package, with a variety of physical health, retirement and savings, caregiving, emotional wellbeing, and other benefits, including “elective” benefits employees may select to best fit the needs and personal situations of our diverse workforce.