12 ways to look at housing’s journey back from the abyss.
Change is good—especially when numbers that tell of loss and debilitation steadily swap out for numbers that speak to progress, balance, even momentum. Here we do some re-arranging of the housing economy’s data dashboard and, taking a page out of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Labor Market Spider Chart, look at 12 housing data points that illustrate both housing’s best points of traction and its areas of challenge.
Jonathan Dienhart, Metrostudy director of custom services and published research, teamed up with data analyst Dian Zhang and design director Aubrey Altmann to develop our Housing Market Recovery Spider Graph, which shows improvement in the areas of fundamental demand and actual absorption. At the same time, we can see some of the supply constraints on the vacant lot inventory and lot delivery sides of the equation. The team converted absolute values for each data benchmark—taken as a snapshot from the fourth quarter average for the past 10 years—into a quintile ranking.