Len Kiefer

Helping people understand the economy, housing and mortgage markets

House price data viz

TO HELP UNDERSTAND TRENDS in house prices, I have a couple of data visualizations for the Freddie Mac house price index. Viz 1: House Price Dynamics The first compares the quarterly and annual appreciation for house prices across the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. In this visualization, each dot represent a state (or D.C.). The horizontal X axis measures the quarter-over-quarter annualized percentage change in the Freddie Mac house price index.

Annotated chartbook, Tufte style

I finally got around to putting together an annotated chartbook, Tufte style, using the Tufte packagefor Rmarkdown. Check it outSome screenshots: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Screenshot 3 Screenshot 4 {% include JB/setup

Vacant housing: from surplus to shortage

EARLIER THIS WEEK the Census Bureau released the latest Housing Vacancy Survey (HVS)data for the first quarter of 2016. Much attentionwent to the homeownership rate estimates, which showed a decline in homeownership rates near a 48-year low. The gif below shows the history of the homeownership rate as estimated by the HVS. And here’s a still image of the same data: Vacancy rates In addition to the homeownership rate, the HVS data contained estimates of both the homeowner and rental vacancy rates.

The week that was in charts

THIS WAS A BUSY WEEK for housing data. On Monday, the NAHB releasedthe NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI), which tracks home builder sentiment. On Tuesday we got New Residential Constructionfrom Census/HUD which gives us housing starts and permits. On Wednesday we got Existing Home Sales (EHS)from the National Association of Realtors. And on Thursday (along with mortgage rates), we got the FHFA House Price Index. These data were eagerly awaited.

Data Viz: Occupation Wages and Regional Cost of Living

A new data viz TODAY THE BLS released dataon metro level wages, employment concentration and regional costs of living. I put together a quick plot and sent out the following tweet: This post provides a link to interactive versions of the same plot and a discussion. The data The BLS data is quite interesting. It combines estimates of the average annual wages by occupation in metro areas with estimates of the relative price level in those areas.

dot plots and distributions

We’re going to make this chart (and talk about it) Wait, what is this? Let’s pause the animation and look at the last frame: This plot shows the distribution of metro area unemployment. These data are available here. Each dot represents a metro area with its unemployment rate depicted on the x axis. The data are bucketed into 0.25 percentage point buckets and stacked when more than one metro falls within that range.

Real house prices and population growth

EARLIER THIS WEEK the U.S. Census Bureau releasedupdated population figures for 2015. These data revealed changes in population across the country. Jed Kolko published a nice summaryof these data, and it got me thinking about the relationship of population growth rates and house prices. In this post I want to consider a few key things I found by exploring these data. First, let’s have a look at the history of real house prices, relative to the year 2000 for 30 large metro areas: