Plotting the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices

Standard & Poor’s publishes the Case-Shiller® Home Price Indices on the last Tuesday of every month. The indices are calculated from data on repeat sales of single family homes. The indices are normalized to have a value of 100 in the first quarter of 2000. It is calculated monthly using a three-month moving average and published with a two month lag. We imported the data released today into Zoho Analytics and created a few charts to see how the house prices have performed over the years.

There’s also a separate chart that plots the Composite 10 and Composite 20 (an aggregate of 10 and 20 cities respectively) index values.

Inferences from the above charts

• West
  • Los Angeles, followed by San Diego are the cities where the prices peaked much (indices of around 275 and 250 respectively)
  • In Seattle and Portland, the prices peaked almost a year late when
    compared to other cities in the West (around Sep 2007 as against Sep
    2006)
  • There was a mini bubble in Los Angeles in 1989-1990
• Midwest
  • Chicago and Minneapolis have seen the maximum rises
  • In Detroit, prices have fallen the most (given the state of the auto industry there)
  • Prices in Cleveland have almost remained level (just went up by 20 points)
• Northeast
  • During
    the bubble years, New York’s prices rose at a faster rate than Boston’s
    (from 1999 to 2004, prices rose almost at the same rate in both the
    cities)
  • In the 1987-1996 time period, prices haven’t varied much in the two cities
• South
  • Prices rose the most in Miami, followed by Washington DC and Tampa
  • Like with Cleveland in the Northeast, prices in Charlotte, Dallas & Atlanta didn’t rise by much
  • There was a brief bubble in 1989-90 in Washington, DC
• General
  • The indices for many of the cities are showing a small uptick for April 2009
  • Almost every region in the US has got uniformly affected by the current housing bubble

Do let us know your own inferences from the above. The data is available here. Play with it and create as many charts as you like. For example, the below is an interactive chart of how the indices in the Midwest cities have been since Jan 2001.

We have created a dashboard too. We will be updating the data on the last Tuesday of every month. The charts embedded above being dynamic will change automatically.

Related Links

• Screencast – How to Import data into Zoho Analytics
• Screencast – How to Create Charts in Zoho Analytics