Housing Archive:

DC is number 1!!!!! WOOHOOO!!!

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Not sure I agree with the written analysis in this article from the Urban Institute, but it contains some interesting medium term charts on the housing market.

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Home equity vs mortgage debt is about to flip back to the good side.

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Of course, this is on a net basis, so a lot of people are still underwater – 6.3 million according to one estimate (13% of mortgages).

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This map is missing a proper label for the legend (sigh) but it is apparently “concentration of underwater mortgages”.

Zillow has a similar interactive analysis that let’s you zoom in, if you want to see how your region is doing:

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Settlement and fines for mortgage abuses are starting to add up to real money. Of course, as Matt Taibbi points out, this is still just a drop in the proverbial bucket compared to the related profits and scale of activities that took place.

(disclaimer: clever post title pilfered from the Economist)

Heat maps of apartment rental prices in DC:

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and Boston:

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and many many other cities using a tool created by Jeff Kaufman.

(via welovedc)

One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. Looks like a lot of indicators are finally in the “typical” range.

Things might be getting back to normal.

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One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care. Looks like a lot of indicators are finally in the “typical” range.

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Energy Sankey

In: Housing Science

7 Aug 2012

We’ve seen these systemically applied. In this case it’s to a multi-family home. Anyone have one for a single home?

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The creator also has a blog post and demo of how he creates these diagrams: http://visualizegreen.posterous.com/pages/create-energy-diagram

Trulia now maps commute times in cities around the country.

One of the reasons I love DC: You can get just about anywhere in less than 30 minutes

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Click on each state in the map with your predictions, and the running total at the bottom will tell you who wins! You can also cycle through the results of elections 1789-2008, which is entertaining if you read the little election facts at the bottom of each map.

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Personally, it kind of reminded me of playing Risk on the computer back in college.

The debate over whether it’s cheaper to rent or buy a house is complicated (where you buy, down payment, size of house, etc). But looking at median prices across the nation and current insanely low mortgage rates can make now look like the best time in a while to buy. Read the comment thread on the linked blog if you want more nuance.

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If you want even more nuance, particularly if you’re buying a house as an investment, I recommend Barry Ritholtz’s 5 part article Debunking the Housing Recovery Story.

A nice map of estimated US mortgages underwater (owe more than it’s worth) from Zillow. Interesting data, but the color ranges are too close in hue for my eyes. When I zoomed into Washington DC I couldn’t tell which range was which unless I used the rollover. I also had a question about the data: how could you end up >200% underwater? (via The Big Picture)

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I think the change over time is the most interesting.

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One of my favorite economic dashboards. It highlights major macro indicators, what direction they are trending, what the typical ranges are, and lets you drill down to explanations of why you should care about these numbers.

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These charts make it pretty clear that the housing market still isn’t functioning anywhere near normal. (via The Big Picture)

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The “discount” below is the foreclosure price vs a non-foreclosure sale.

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