WSJ Housing Inventory Trends

Check out this Wall Street Journal Interactive graphic showing changes in housing inventory in the past two years. It has some useful and novel features that make exploring the 18 different cities and 3 different regions easier over the past 20 months.

Here's one of the more interesting charts that I created in just a few minutes of exploration.


For the six cities shown (Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix) the upward trends since October 2005 are plain to see.

Try it out yourself and see what you can discover.

Here are my thoughts on the pluses and minuses of these interactive chart features

On the plus side

1. A single click selects a new factor to add to the mix of factors already selected for the chart

2. When adding a new factor into the mix, it highlights that new factor on the chart and reduces the intensity of the other factors on the chart until you move the mouse over the chart again when all factors selected come into full view. This helps you lock in on the colors for the new factor before they become blended with the other factors.

3. When you move the mouse over the check box for a factor that has already been selected, that factor is highlighted against the other factors currently selected with a little pop up text box that tells you the current inventory value exactly.

4. A single click as all that's required to de-select a factor.

5. A single click for one of the three areas (East, Central, West) selects all the factors for that area. And once a whole area has been selected, a single click de-selects all factors currently checked.

6. All of the above pluses add to ease of use and time saving when exploring this data set for the most interesting and telling patterns.

On the minus side

A. Way too short a time range. To make full sense of these trends and put the recent behavior in perspective needs at least 5 years and preferably 10 to 25 years of history.

B. Some major cities that are in the top 10 in population are missing - New York, Philadelphia, and San Antonio.

C. No way to adjust Y axis scaling. This is a serious drawback. The scale runs from zero to 110 thousand which is fine for viewing the trend for Los Angeles which has a range between 45, 000 and 103,000, but it makes it difficult to grasp the trends for such cities as Minneapolis which varies from 25,000 to 31,000 or Baltimore which ranges from 5,000 to 10,000. Both of these cities look flat line during this period even though when you examine them closely they really aren't. Y axis scaling options such as the possibility of calculating the Min-Max scaling for the factors charted would help bring the trends for all cities into clear view.

D. No available view of the data using percentage change from a baseline value for determining the Y axis value. Such a normalizing option would simplify comparisons between cities.

E. No option for showing aggregate results for a region or for stacking the factors selected.

F. If you wish to look at each factor separately, it takes two clicks. One to de-select the previous factor, and one to select the new factor.

G. No option for smoothing with features such as moving averages

H. Missing trend data for other related factors for each city such as

• Inventory breakdown by New and Existing housing
  
• Average number of months houses have been on the market (total, new, existing)
• Median selling price in that market (total, new, existing)
• Rate of sales per month in that market (total, new, existing)
• Number of months of inventory at current sales rate (total, new, existing)

I. Missing option for downloading the underlying data set thereby enabling further analysis.

Hat tip to Barry Ritholtz at The Big Picture

The Big Picture | Some More Housing Charts

Barry Ritholtz does it again with this excellent post which contains 4 excellent and easily readable charts on the trends affecting the housing market.

This time, Barry tells the story using pictures without commentary. The charts he selected are excellent and speak for themselves without commentary. However, Barry always adds something to the mix when he adds in his thoughts and perspectives and experience on what he sees in the charts and what it is most likely to mean.

Barry does give us a money quote with these few words to wrap up his post:

Funny thing: The charts tell pretty much the same story the words did: The housing story is only halfway done, going to get worse as time progresses. We are not anyway near a bottom in Residential Real Estate.

I do miss the words, so here are copies of the charts accompanied with my ordinary citizen, non-housing-expert comments on what they might be telling us and focusing on the degree to which these charts make best use of best practices for conveying trend results graphically.

This first chart is both interesting and scary. It would have been great to see what the Reset Amounts have been for the past 10 or 20 years rather than just the past 4 or 5 months. If I am reading this correctly, it sure looks like we are into a 12-18 month period with extremely high reset amounts, where a very small percent are for Prime ARM. Note that this chart is originally from Credite Suisse via Lamont Trading Advisers to At These Levels and then to The Big Picture.

Stacked bar charts are often difficult to use to interpret the behavior of the sub components such as Unsecuritized ARMs. Important trend information about these sub factors may be hiding in a chart such as this. My own preference in these cases is to use individual charts for each factor that I consider important so I can understand the individual behavior AND the composite behavior of all these factors.

This 3 year chart originally from Northern Trust is plain as day. Having the 20 or 25 year chart for this same key factor would have made this even better and clearer and more useful. Some smoothing, maybe a 3 month average could also be helpful here. It's important to note that this chart is based on combining two other factors - the actual total inventory of homes, and the most recent rate of sales of existing homes. For reference, having charts for these other two factors to look at in parallel to this calculated metric would also be useful.


This next chart gives us a nice 20 year view. having a complementary 3 year view would let us look more closely and better understand the very sharp recent spike.


For this next chart, my own preference would be to look at these two factors separately on their own chart first using a 20 to 25 year view.



As a general comment, having a shifting time window for every chart makes things much more difficult on the viewer.

Housing Freefall Continues Unabated

You can find some more good charts and commentary on Housing from Barry Ritholtz over at The Big Picture.

Here's the first chart. You won't be surprised to learn that I like the long time sweep. However, this also looks like a case where having a second, shorter term chart - maybe for the past 3 years would help us better understand the more recent behavior


In contrast, the second chart shows just the 3+ year view and presents that very well. Having a 20 year year to match the first one would have been even better.

The whole article is worth a read for the extra perspective it brings.

An Old Fashioned Trend Visualization Appliance

And speaking about the excellent Calculated Risk Blog, I would like to point out the following exemplary post on the Housing market.

Using just the ordinary blog posting mechanism and the ability to embed JPG pictures as the Trend Visualization Appliance, the resulting article has a high degree of explanatory power and immediacy. You can literally see what Calculated Risk is talking about as you read as a result of the great blend of clarifying text with the easy to read trend graphics in close proximity.

Not relying on the normal conventions of providing only one or two graphics for headline numbers, Calculated Risks walks us through a series of 6 or 7 less well known but still key factors. This leaves the reader/viewer which a much more complete view of the dynamics that are at work in this one complex area.

Combine this with good references back to data sources and consistently good judgment on what would constitute a reasonable time frame, leaves with a very useful end result that provides the reader with the maximum amount of infomation in relatively short period of time.

The only difficulty with this is the same one I face with this TimelineView blog -- namely that as a limitation of BLOGGER.COM the largest allowed size of the embedded images is just too small to be fully readable and understandable in most instances. To really understand the charts, at least at first, usually requires clicking for the larger image and then using the browser navigation controls to go back to the main page. This really slows down the flow of reading and understanding.

I think we can all learn a lot by watching how Calculated Risk handles these kinds of presentations. Take a look at the post or other similar posts that appear regularly at Calculated Risk and you will see what I mean.

The Importance of Mortgage Equity Withdrawal (MEW)

Another hat tip to Barry Ritholtz in his post on The Big Picture The Capital Commerce Debate this time highlighting some eye opening and vital data about MEW (Mortgage Equity Withdrawal) using charts from courtesy of CalculatedRisk.

You can find a very recent Calculated Risk article here with comments on the debate between Barry Ritholtz and Don Luskin and a clarification of the meaning of the second chart here.

Another Easy to Read Housing Chart

Here's another easy to read chart that I find attractive from Political Calculations' post on the Boom in Realtors. The long time sweep creates excellent perspective. It would be interesting to zoom in on the past 30 years for another view.

San Diego Mortgage Defaults & Foreclosures

Here's a nice crisp chart that I think is instantly understandable. I especially like the long time sweep so the most recent data can be put into perspective. You can find the full story at:
voiceofsandiego.org: Toscano... Motivated Sellers Abound


It would be nice to be able to flip through a series of charts like this for a sampling of strategic areas or state by state to be able to compare how the San Diego trends match up against other parts of the country.

Hat tip to Kirk for this post at Reasons Unbeknownst