Illuminating Real Estate Market Data

Today we released data on home value bands across 125 metropolitan areas.  Click HERE to read the media alert, or click HERE to dive into the data yourself. 

At times, the world of real estate data and analytics seems vast and complicated. But with organization and visualization, sometimes it can be illuminating. Trying to make sense of the markets can be challenging due to the wide range of homes and values throughout the nation. A $300,000 home near the San Francisco coast is very different than a $300,000 home in Denver. As a matter of fact, you probably can’t find a home in good condition on the California coast for $300,000, but that’s getting a bit specific.

We’ve created a visualization which allows one to compare the following:

• Multiple Markets: We’ve broken out the top 49 markets + the US because all real estate is local.
• Home Value Bands: Each market is divided up into 5 value bands; top, lower-middle, middle, upper-middle, top.
• Home Value Change: See how markets have moved during the past year (Dec 31, 2006 to Dec 31, 2007).

Now, on to the visualization. Let’s take a look at the United States first (Click for full size):

For more metro areas, click the alphabetically ordered links below:

• Akron - Chicago
• Cleveland - Knoxville
• Las Vegas - Orlando
• Oxnard - San Diego
• San Francisco - Washington

Nationally, there is a slight trend with the higher end homes down more than the lower end homes. The middle set of homes, representing the middle 20% of homes, ranges from about $200,000 to about $300,000 and is down about 6% year-over-year. As you scroll down to individual metro areas, you will see that this middle set of homes varies greatly across markets. In some markets (Akron, Little Rock, Oklahoma City), you will see that the high end homes barely come up to $200,000. Conversely, on the high end, San Jose’s low-end home values start above the value of the middle set of homes in the U.S. overall.

Another surprising trend is how high-end homes perform versus low-end homes across the markets. One might expect the expensive homes to be dropping faster, but we’re seeing many markets where the opposite is true such as San Francisco, Bridgeport, and Denver. In fact, higher valued homes outperformed lower valued homes in nearly half of the top 25 metro areas. In only 20 percent of these markets did lower valued homes outperform higher valued ones.

How’s your metro area and price band doing? If you’re in one of the markets where the high end homes are rising while all other homes are declining (examples: Washington, DC or San Francisco) what do you think is the cause of the contrast? Do you think that the high end homes will eventually take the same hit that all other homes are taking?