NH solar homes get more Zillow views than in any other state – does that stat mean anything?

The site MarketWatch says home with solar get more average views on Zillow in New Hampshire than in any other state. That sounds impressive, but is it really?

(Full article is here, with some state-v-state and city-v-city data about solar homes, scraped from Zillow.)

The article lacks two important pieces of information: Number of solar homes in the state, and comparison to views of non-solar homes in that state.

New Hampshire, a solar laggard, has relatively few homes with rooftop panels compared to neighboring states and those homes tend to have well-off owners, which are the big ones that get lots of views. It would take relatively few homes with a ton of views to skew the median compared to, say, Vermont, which has a lot more solar homes because the state supports them.

So while the data sounds like it’s saying “New Hampshire home-buyers are more interested in solar than anywhere else” it might just be saying “New Hampshire homes with solar are more likely to be impressive than anywhere else, because solar hasn’t spread to the standard houses yet.”