Recent trends in house prices

IN LATE 2016 HOUSE PRICES recovered back to their pre-recession peak. At least nationally. At least not adjusted for inflation. Let’s talk about it.

Looking within states

House prices at a state level can also obscure important local trends, particularly for large states. Let’s view metro area house price trends within two large states, California and Texas.

This graph is the same style as the state dotplot above, but considers the metro areas that are located in California (specifically those whose primary state is California). We can see that generally house prices are rising in the Golden State, with Salinas leading the pack with 12.6 percent year-over-year house price growth in December 2016.

Contrast with Texas:

In Texas a few metros are experiencing a year-over-year decline in house prices (Longview, Midland, Odessa, and Victoria).These declines are at least in part due to the contraction in the energy sector. College Station-Bryan leads all Texas metros with 12.9 percent year-over-year house price appreciation in December 2016.

While recently house price growth in California has exceeded that in Texas, it might be helpful to compare the history. The animated gifs below echo the one we made for the U.S., first for California and Texas individually, then in a side-by-side comparison.

House price grand tour

In the graphs below, we take a “grand tour” of the US and explore house price trends.

First let’s take a tour of the largest metro areas in the U.S. and see house price trends. The dot on the map indicates which metro we are currently visiting and then the graphs below show the level of the index and the year-over-year-percent change in the index for the metro area.

Tour 4 large states

Let’s visit the metro areas within 4 large states, California, Texas, Florida and Ohio.

California tour

Texas tour

Florida tour

Ohio tour

Code for plots

If you are intrested in how I made these graphics, check out the following posts. I have shared bits and pieces of code for all of these posts in the past. All these graphics were made with R.

Relevant Posts to check out

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