Independent Market Intelligence for Economic Development
Independent Market Intelligence for Economic Development
Every metric that appears in a Harborwright report traces back to one of the authoritative sources on this page — public federal data, licensed products, or Harborwright’s own proprietary research.
Harborwright AI is built on authoritative, primarily public federal, data — supplemented by Harborwright’s proprietary research where no public equivalent exists. Sources are grouped by quality tier: Primary leads every headline metric, Supporting corroborates with licensed and proprietary inputs, Reference provides research context, and Tier 4 is never cited.
Sources published directly by U.S. federal statistical agencies. These are the primary input for every headline metric.
The foundational demographic dataset: population, age, income, households, tenure, commute, language, education, and housing characteristics down to block-group geography. Updated annually with a 5-year rolling sample.
Annual vintage population totals for states, counties, and metros. More current than ACS for total counts.
Origin-destination commute flows, workplace-area employment, and residence-area employment. The backbone of labor-shed and commute-flow analysis.
Monthly unemployment rate, labor force, and employment for states, metros, and counties.
Quarterly count of every UI-covered job — about 95% of U.S. employment — with NAICS industry detail and county-level wages.
Annual count of establishments, employment, and payroll by NAICS, down to ZIP code.
Personal income, per-capita income, and GDP by industry for counties and metros.
Monthly residential permits by unit count (1, 2, 3-4, 5+) for counties and places.
ACS tabulations with income, tenure, and cost-burden crosses. The authoritative source for cost-burdened and severely-cost-burdened household counts.
Annual 40th-percentile gross rent by unit size and county.
Origin-destination freight flows for tons, value, and ton-miles between FAF regions, classified by commodity code.
Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) and truck AADT on principal highways, delivered through the FHWA ArcGIS REST service.
Intermodal facilities, principal ports, NPIAS airports, railroad network, and the National Highway System.
Generator inventory and monthly net generation. Powers site-level assessments of electrical supply for data centers and power-intensive manufacturing.
Authoritative 100-year and 500-year floodplain boundaries, delivered through the FEMA NFHL ArcGIS service.
Monthly cold-storage capacity in million cubic feet by state — a key input for refrigerated-warehouse and food-distribution demand.
Import and export values by U.S. port.
The authoritative geospatial platform behind Harborwright’s mapping and location analytics. We use Esri’s Living Atlas, ArcGIS Business Analyst demographics, and World Imagery base layers for every site-level analysis, labor-shed map, and drive-time calculation in our reports.
Visit source →Licensed data products that re-package or model on top of Primary public inputs, together with Harborwright’s own proprietary research. Every Supporting source is cited by name and vintage inside the report.
Harborwright’s proprietary monitoring of new-home community, plan, and pricing inventory for more than 50 national and regional home builders. Refreshed continuously and joined to trade-area geography for supply and price-point analysis.
Harborwright’s proprietary transaction-level housing data pipeline. Applies Census-style statistical inference (z = 1.645 at 90% confidence) so that sub-county aggregates carry honest error bars rather than point-estimate false precision.
Licensed demographic, consumer-spending, and lifestyle segmentation products attached to custom trade-area geographies (drive-time polygon, radius, or shape).
Industry trade-association reports, academic studies, and broker surveys. Used as corroboration, never as the sole source of a headline claim.
Harborwright reports never cite Tier 4 sources. Blogs, press releases, and sources with no disclosed methodology are excluded by policy.
Harborwright’s analytical framework is encoded as approximately hundreds of internal rules — small, testable decision rules that the engine runs against every report. Internal rules are grouped into training packs by domain (residential absorption, retail capture, office labor shed, industrial logistics, multifamily rent-to-income, infrastructure readiness, and statistical reliability). The canonical machine-readable source registry documents every dataset’s tier, agency, cadence, smallest available geography, metrics offered, MOE rules, and the report sections it powers.
For a full walkthrough of how internal rules are structured and how they run, see the Methodology page.
Related: Glossary · Methodology
