House price growth and employment trends

2017/05/03

R / dataviz / economy / house prices

IN THIS POST I WANT TO REVIEW RECENT EMPLOYMENT AND HOUSE PRICE TRENDS at the metropolitan statistical area. No R code here, but you can recreate the graphs we’ll explore today by following the code in this post.

This week the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released updated metro employment data (LINK) and Freddie Mac released its Freddie Mac House Price Index for over 300 metro areas as well as the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the United States. Let’s see how employment and house price growth relate.

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First, let’s consider annual house price growth in the Washington, D.C. metro area.

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Let’s consider employment growth for the Washington D.C. area:

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Let’s compare employment and house price growth in the Washington D.C. metro area:

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Periods of high (low) employment growth correspond to periods of high (low) house price growth.

How do these trends vary across metro areas?

Let’s look at 12 large metro areas:

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While in general the scatterplots follow an upward trend, there’s quite a bit of variation across markets.

Let’s take a tour:

BONUS: Let’s add an animated scatterplot

House price growth and employment trends

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