Senior Economist

Senior Economist at Realtor.com (View all jobs) 

Location: Austin, TX 

Who We Are

http://Realtor.com is seeking an 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 http://Realtor.com ’s proprietary data with relevant data from industry, government, and partners.
• Collaborate with internal communication and research teams and partners on topical research projects to foster http://Realtor.com ’s share of voice. This includes data analysis, report 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 http://Realtor.com ’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 http://realtor.com/research , 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 value creativity and innovation, supported by in-person collaboration. Our employees work in the office three or more days a week to foster a close-knit culture and drive collaboration.

What You’ll Bring:

• Degree in statistics, economics, computer science or a related area. Masters/PhD or similar degree candidates or recent grads preferred.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience in applied data science and/or economic research (real estate or housing experience preferred).
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal including:
• 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).
• Experience building ETL pipelines (e.g. Airflow, DBT) and productionalizing models a strong plus.
• 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).
• Proven track record analyzing large amounts of data and crafting data-driven stories
• Strong collaborator with the ability to work independently and cross-functionally