Tight Inventory EARLIER THIS WEEK, Trulia published a post by Chief Economist Ralph McLaughlincalled “House Arrest: How Low Inventory Is Slowing Home Buying”. The article analyzed trends in housing inventory.
Trulia broke housing inventory into “starter homes”, “move-up homes”, and “premium homes”. They found that the inventory of available homes for-sale has shifted towards premium homes and away from starter homes that first time homebuyers would typically be buying. We’re not here to talk housing inventory, but I recommend you take a look.
Mid-week chart update With existing home sales, house prices, and new home sales being released, this is one of the busiest weeks of the month for housing data. We’ll catch new home sales tomorrow morning, but let’s catch our breath and recap what we’ve learned so far this week.
Existing home sales disappoint The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reportedon existing home sales (EHS) on Monday. Existing home sales for February surprised most by dropping 7.
This past week I tracked several data releases that give us an idea of the health and vibrancy of the economy and housing markets.
State employment trends positive Consistent with the national employment numbers state employment trends are positive. The BLS reportedon employment trends by state for January 2016 this week. Eleven states plus DC had a statistically significant month-to-month increases in employment and five states experienced month-to-month declines.
One state I’ve been focused on is Texas due to its reliance on oil and gas drilling.
Resilient job growth SPRING IS ALMOST HERE, and housing market activity will start to accelerate as we enter the peak homebuying season in the spring and summer months. The latest jobs report shows the U.S. labor market continues to pick up steam, adding 242,000 jobs month-over-month and beating expectations. Job growth has been resilient since the end of the Great Recession in June 2009, with monthly job growth averaging over 200,000 since 2011.
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National house prices rise 6.2% Freddie Mac released its full year 2015 house price index and an interactive data visualization. The seasonally-adjusted national index increased 6.2 percent year-over-year and is now 29.6 percent above the post-recession low, and just 4.1 percent below the (nominal) pre-recession peak (see graph below).
While national house price growth has been strong, there is considerable variation across the country. Some states and metro areas are already well above their pre-recession (nominal) peak, while other still have lots of ground to make up.
BELOW IS A VISUALIZATION of household size and composition and homeownership from the Census1going back to 1980. With this visualization, we can see how household size and tenure choice (own vs rent) has varied by age over time.
1Data from Ipums: IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org.
See my data visualizations on Tableau Public
Homeownership and the Jobs Outlook BELOW IS A VISUALIZATION of job growth and homeownership by occcupation. This viz details expected job growth by occupation compared to homeownership rate by occupation. This viz was originally published on Freddiemac.com. This viz shows compares variation in homeownership rates by occupation with expected job growth for those occupations. The size of the bubbles correspond to the expected number of job openings for that occupation. Projected job openings come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the homeownership rate comes from the American Community Survey, public use microdata.
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Making a data viz SOMETIMES ANIMATION CAN BE USEFUL, though it is often misused. I’ve been tracking the week-to-week changes in mortgage rates, and animating with a GIF.
Example animated gif with mortgage rates from 1/1/2013 to 3/10/2016 I build my gif using the R statistical package.
Perhaps I’ll explain more of the details later, but the R code below uses the ggplot2, ggthemes and animation packages to create the plots, style them, and save the animation.
Mid-week chart update THERE HAVE NOT been a lot of data releases this week, but that’s no excuse not to get busy charting. I tweeted out several charts so far this week. Here’s a recap of my favorites for this half-week.
Are wages increasing…or is it merely a trick of the light? We got this week’s charting started with some data from last week. The jobs report came out last Friday (see our discussion from last week) .
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The week ahead Next week there are several data releases but the two that I’m paying especially close attention to are the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI)and Housing Starts, part of the New Residential Constructionjoint release by Census and HUD.
Will builders maintain their sunny outlook? The HMI is a diffusion index based on survey questions about homebuilder’s attitudes. Values of the index above 50 indicate that on balance, more respondents feel positive than negative about the current conditions in and direction of the single-family housing market.