SO TODAY I SPENT SOME TIME WITH THE KIDDOS and contemplated the Enlightenment, so I didn’t have time to write up some code. But I will post a couple images that I think are interesting. I’ve got two plots for you, both using geofacets. See this post on using the geofacet package in R to make plots like these. The first plot shows U.S. house price trends by metro area from January 2015 to December 2017.
LAST YEAR WE TOURED recent house price trends Post. Let’s update the data visualizations with data through December 2017. We are going to show house price trends using data from the publicly available Freddie Mac House Price Index. Animation: Here’s an updated animation showing trends in the top 20 metro areas, based on population. Below, I’ll plot stills for each of the 20 metro areas. Later I’ll follow up with some additional visualizations and some commentary.
EARLIER THIS WEEK I TWEETED out a poll asking whether or not folks wanted to see a thread/tweetstorm with slides from an upcoming presentation on the economy and housing markets that I’m giving. Over 90 percent voted for a thread. So I shared it. In this post let me add a little more commentary on the individual slides. Here’s the thread I ended up posting: Thread (0/5). I'm giving an update on economy, #housing and #mortgage market trends.
THIS MORNING I SAW AN INTERESTING CHART OVER ON BLOOMBERG. In this post they compared recent 10-year Treasury yield movements with the Taper Tantrum in 2013. The chart you can see here was an area chart with overlapping line plots. I thought it would be a fun exercise to remix a similar chart with R. Eventually it will look like this: Let’s make our remix and try out a few alternative plots.
Hey check it out! Me on a podcast: https://policyviz.com/podcast/episode-111-len-kiefer/. We talk about data visualization and how I use it at work. A bit about using R too. I got the opportunity to talk with Jon Schwabish on the Policyviz podcast. Jon’s PolicyViz blog has a lot of cool data visualization stuff, including chart remakes and thoughtful discussion. There’s a bunch of other neat stuff on the page too. So check out the podcast and take a look around the page, there’s a lot of useful stuff there.
IN THIS POST I WANT TO SHARE R code for a simple animated line plot using ggplot2. In the past I’ve shared similar code, but over time my workflow has evolved. So I thought it would be good to post an updated bit of code. We’ll use economic data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Economic Database (FRED). See for example this post for more on using FRED with the tidyquant package.
EARLIER TODAY THE U.S. CENSUS BUREAU released new estimates of population for U.S. states from 2010 through 2017. Let’s see how population trends look compared to recent house price growth. We’ll combine the Census estimates for state population with the Freddie Mac House Price Index. The chart below plots population growth rates by state from July of 2010 to July of 2017 against house price appreciation rates over that same period.
LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT RECENT U.S. macroeconomic trends by making a couple plots with R code. Since we’re going to be looking at U.S. macroeconomic data, the data we’ll need is available in the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank Economic Database FRED. Below I’ll walk you through creating the plots. Where are we in the business cycle After the BLS released their employment situation report (the Jobs report) last week I tweeted out:
THE UNITED STATES IS NOT building enough homes to meet demand. Be sure to check out my upcoming presentation at Realtor University to learn more about whether or not this could mean a house price bubble. One reason often cited for low levels of construction is a lack of labor. How do construction trends compare to construction employment? Let’s take a look. Financial blogger Logan Mohtashami (Twitter, blog) tweeted out (he’s a power Twitter user so I’m not sure exactly when or where, so I probably saw it multiple places) an interesting observation on housing construction and employment (see blog post).
IT IS THANKSGIVING WEEK HERE IN THE UNITED STATES. I’m getting ready to go out for a nice casual drive down Interstate I-95. Should be fun. After I get back stuffed with turkey and whatnot, we’ll get back to data visualizations and analysis. But let me leave you a couple animated gifs showing recent housing and mortgage market trends. Mortgage rate trends First, let’s just look at a line plot of trends in the 30-year fixed mortgage rate: