We primarily focused on Twitter data that was a couple years removed from the last census, which may explain the improvement.
we also ran an experiment using the Twitter data from (Schwartz et al., 2013) which spans 2009 to 2010, and found similar results: the residualized control approach improved the Pearson r for 'increased price' from 0.36 to 0.44 and for 'foreclosure' from 0.65 to 0.69.