HousingTracker Individual City Data

Friday, September 02 2005

I've got the individual city pages on HousingTracker set up about how I'd like them for now. I see plenty of things that I want to work on, but I've got other stuff on my plate right now and I'll just have to make those additions over a bit longer time frame that I had planned. But the individual city pages look pretty nice. As of today, there is not enough data for the trend portion of the page to reveal anything, but come September 14th I'll have enough accumulated price and inventory data to have the 1 month trend fill with a real percent change.

I'm still figuring out to how I'm going to update the data. I've been keeping track of prices for a couple of places on my own for a while now, and I've always seen that inventory tends to drop around the first of the month. I think it must just be that listings expire at the end of the month dropping the numbers slightly, but then I noticed that the San Diego listings went from 10,000 something to 2,000 something. That's huge and obviously not realistic. In fact, checking today (1 day later), the inventory in San Diego is back up to 10,000 something again. What this tells me is that I need to skip the update right around the first of the month. So, I'll probably delete the September 1 data in a couple of days and only update on the 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th. This should get rid of most of the beginning of the month and end of the month weirdness -- which should make for more reliable data.

So what cities am I watching? Most of the cities in California are pretty bubbly, so I've been watching them a lot. San Diego, Los Angeles, and Sacramento especially because they have pretty good sized inventories. Miami is also a good one to check because the income of the residents of the city is shockingly low for the median asking prices that the data shows. As I discussed in a post a couple of months ago on home price to income ratios, this kind of departure signals trouble in a local market to me. Las Vegas and Phoenix also make my interesting list. They've got some of the most rapidly appreciating real estate in the country right now most likely because they are experiencing an influx of California money. You can already tell from both of their inventory numbers that homes are staying on the market longer. Whether or not this leads to a reversal of price growth and when is left to be determined.

I'm still thinking about other cities to add, so if you have a suggestion send me an email. I've actually got the comments closed right now cause of the damn spammers, but I hope to change that soon.

Update: OK, comments are turned on for Typekey users. It's not my first choice to authenticate like this, but the Spam was killin' me.