If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m kind of a nerd. I heard on the news the other day that home prices are falling once again, and my first thought was “I want to see that graphed!” rather than “Oh no, the economy is collapsing!” 

I grabbed the Case Shiller Home Price index information and plotted it as a simple time series in a Line Plot. Easy. But paraphrasing the words that Tina Turner sang: “I never do nothin’ nice and easy.”    

So off I went to find more data. I found housing construction data from the US Census and 30-year conventional mortgage rate information from the St. Louis Fed. 

Now we have three lines of data so we can see how each of these series changes over time since January of 2000. 

Keep reading