Portland rent-board presentation: covered-unit medians under $1,600; zeros and exempt registrations distort dataset

Matt Walker, a Portland Rent Board member and the meeting’s data presenter, reviewed the city’s 2023–2024 rental-registration data and methodology at a February special meeting, saying the dataset should be interpreted only for covered units because many exempt units are entered as zeros in the registration software.

The presentation matters because the board must rely on the registration dataset to produce the annual rent report, to identify possible violations, and to set or recommend changes to board procedures. Board members and staff said the software’s requirement that a numeric value be entered forces many exempt units to show a $0 rent, which distorts simple counts and some summary statistics.

Walker told the board that the dataset snapshot used for the analysis compares “current” rent (November 2023) to “previous” rent (November 2022) because the full 2024 registration year was not yet available. He said he did not remove outliers except for $0 rents tied to exempt units and relied on medians rather than averages to reduce the influence of high-valued outliers.

Dylan, a Licensing & Housing Safety staff member who supplied and explained the registration data, summarized staff guidance on the zeros: “I have run into things where we thought there was a violation and turns out it was an exempt property and they just…