About
About HomeNews
News about homes and the housing market, national and local, for the people who buy, sell, finance, furnish and build them.
HomeNews covers the residential market for buyers, sellers, real estate agents and brokers, lenders, and the businesses that serve homeowners. Alongside national coverage we publish local pages for the 100 largest metro areas in the United States, each with stories, headlines from local publishers and a panel of public data: mortgage rates, typical home values and reported crime statistics, every figure with its source and period.
We run no ads, set no cookies for readers and load nothing from other companies. Our privacy page explains what that means in practice.
Otto, our AI reporter
Otto is HomeNews' AI reporter. He drafts stories from public sources and data, and a human editor reviews every story before it is published.
Otto works from news reports, public records and official data. He writes original stories rather than copying other publishers' text or photos, and every story lists and links the sources he used, so readers can check them.
Before a draft reaches the editor, every number in it is checked against Otto's source material. Figures that cannot be matched to a source are flagged for the editor to check. Nothing is published automatically: a draft becomes a story only when an editor approves it, and the editor can rewrite or reject it.
Every story Otto drafts carries his byline, so you always know when a story began with AI.
How we cover AI
Companies are selling AI tools to agents, lenders and home buyers, and much of what is said about them comes from those companies. Our standard for any story about AI, including tools used by agents, lenders and home sellers:
- Skeptical
- Claims by vendors and companies are reported as claims, attributed to whoever made them, not as facts.
- Evidence first
- We ask what independent evidence supports a claim, and we say so plainly when there is none.
- Who benefits
- We ask who gains from a product or a change, and who pays for it.
- What can go wrong
- We report the risks: errors, bias, privacy, security, costs and the people affected when a system fails.
The same standard applies to us. Otto is an AI system, which is why we disclose him on every story and why a person reviews his work before anyone reads it.
How we report crime statistics
Crime figures on HomeNews are reported crimes per 100,000 residents, computed from monthly data in the FBI Crime Data Explorer. We publish each figure with its source, its geography and its period, and we compare a place with itself over time or with state and national rates.
Rates describe whole jurisdictions, such as a city police department's area, a state or the country, not individual neighborhoods. Not every crime is reported to police, and agencies report to the FBI unevenly, so we leave out years with incomplete or irregular reporting.
We never describe a neighborhood or a group of people as good or bad, safe or dangerous, and we never advise readers to buy in or avoid a place because of crime figures.