How to Get US Economic Data
In this video, we will cover how to retrieve US housing market data to review economic and housing metrics, you will be able to create stunning graphs to analyze your market. This includes data at the US National level down to the zip code level, you will be able to review information from reputable sources including Redfin census, and Fred.
Ariel Herrera 0:00
As the US economy is changing and heading towards a recession, the best way to be prepared is to use data driven analysis to make decisions. In this video, we will cover how to retrieve US housing market data to review economic and housing metrics, you will be able to create stunning graphs to analyze your market. This includes data at the US National level down to the zip code level, you will be able to review information from reputable sources including Redfin census, and Fred. My name is Ariel Herrera, your fellow data scientists with the analytics area channel where we bridge the gap between real estate and technology. I love solving real estate problems with data. And if you do too, and want to learn more about tips and tricks for data driven results, then hit the subscribe button and like this video. Alright, let's get started.
In this video, I'm going to discuss two concepts here. First, what is the data that we want to retrieve? And second, how do we get this data with a click of a button without needing to have any programming skills, I will have a future video of using the API directly with Python, if you're interested in that as well. But to start, here, I'm on Tableau. I've consolidated data from multiple data sources. We could see here that we have national US housing stats, we can quickly see for the month ending in August 2022, that median sale price was at 406,000. We could see from 2012 onwards that this has really increased over a 10 year timeframe, we could see average sale to list meaning say if a home was 100,000 listed, but ended up selling at 99,900 what that relationship is, and we see it starting to decline in 2022, where less houses are going over asking. We also could see months of supply is climbing up inventory also climbing up. And you might be thinking why are there certain spikes that go up and down repeatedly? Let's because you as housing is seasonal, where there's less transaction selling and buying happening within the winter months. Something that I want to note here is that price drops are happening more significantly than previous, a lot of sellers were still hopeful to have their house to sell at a peak. However, due to increasing interest rates, we could see that that hasn't been as hard of a market as it was prior to. And a lot of these wishful thinking prices for homes have now started to drop, which is one of the largest drops that we've seen over a 10 year timeframe. This data is super useful to analyze and understand how the housing market has changed not only at a static one month basis, but also looking back several months and looking at year over year trends. Now what's really neat is that in this dashboard, recoupling data, not just with US housing, we're also taking economic stats, we could see on the far left, we have a chart here for inflation versus Fed funds rate between the time period of May 2022, January 2022, we had historically low interest rates, and thus there's a relationship that's inverse for inflation rate, where we see that has increased significantly within that time period, which is why the Fed is looking currently to increase the Fed funds rate to bring inflation levels down. We can also see inverse relationships with unemployment rate versus total unfilled jobs, as well as days on market and sold above list. Now tabbing over to state data. We can also observe information at a more granular geographic development. In particular for state we can use visualizations in Tableau to quickly see stats like building permits, and what areas have the highest number of building permits, as well. We can look at unemployment rate. Here I'm filtering just on Florida. And I could see how Florida's unemployment rate has shot up during the pandemic times which happened across the US during this time, and then came back down. Now if we're interested in this number, which is price drops, we could see that for Florida price drops most recently has been even more significant than other markets. That's because this is below the national average that we saw previously in this other dashboard. So we could dive deeper into our market and look at price drops on the right hand side we could see for Florida a month over month basis of price drops. scores, we're seeing one of the highest spikes within the last decade. And we can also observe how Florida compares to other states, which we could see Idaho has actually had the highest price drops. Now at this stage, you're wondering how do we get this data so that we can create more visualizations and understand our markets? Well as a basis this data comes from three different sources. Redfin publishes data at several different region levels, including County Metro State, national zip, code, and neighborhood. Here, you can download the data all the way at the bottom. But this is a little bit difficult to unpack since it's an A G zip file. This can be very cumbersome, especially if you're looking at data down to zip code level. Next, we have for economic and housing data census information, which is from the US government. This data can be queried using their API, but it can be difficult to map things as we go more granular into zip code. And lastly, we have Fred data, which takes information from multiple US government and trusted data sources available for an API. But again, this data isn't all encompassing into one source until now, being the data geek that I am. I've consolidated this information at both the national level all the way down to neighborhood level, so that we could observe quickly information for housing and economic stats across Redfin census. And Fred, this API is being hosted on rapidapi COMM, which is like a marketplace for API's where you could find multiple datasets. Now, if you're not a programmer, no worries, I made sure to add other strategies so that you can acquire the data as well. So if you look at the link below, you should see this link for the US housing market data app. And this basically allows you to plug in an API key, and then retrieve a CSV file, so like Excel rows and columns, so that you can input this into a Tableau dashboard. So let's walk through an example of how to use this in live action. So first, you will come over to rapid API, and create a free login, you could use your Google account in order to do so. Now once you have completed that, you will need to come over to the US housing market data API. If you go to pricing, I offer several different tiers, including basic, which is free. Now if you want data that's going to encompass not just Redfin housing data, but also Fred, and census for economic data, you will need to go to a Pro Plan and hit subscribe for all students in the intro to real estate Data Analytics course, you automatically get the mega for six months included within your subscription. So once you have subscribed to the API, you can then come back to endpoints. And you will see that you have an API key. Because I'm not signed in. I have signed up for API key, but you will have an actual code here. This code is now what you bring over to the app, you enter in your unique API key. So I'm going to bring over my API key. So we can walk through an example here, I enter in my API key and I press Enter, I now get returned API key has been answered. Now in this case, I want to get national data. And I want it to be enriched. What does enriched mean? It means that I'm bringing in not just Redfin data, but also economic data, like unemployment rate, total population and more. So I'm going to select national enriched, I can view my estimated API calls, which will be just one call and make a request, I can then download the data as a CSV file. If we look at the data, we have information dating back to 2012. We have information coming from Fred including total population for the US Fed funds rate, consumer price, index, PCE household debt, working age, population, unemployment rate, and more. We also have all of our housing stats, including median sale, price, median, list, price, price per square foot inventory, price drops, and again, more columns are available. You could use this app to gather more information at State County, and all the way down to the zip code level. If you wanted to understand what data is within each of these datasets, you can go over to the Code tab. Even if you're not a programmer, that's fine because I show for each of these regions what the example output is, so you can hover over the data frame or a table and you can scroll over to the right hand side to see an example of all the columns or data that you'd be able to retrieve. You can also retrieve data for state information, as well as county, and zip code. I also have a preview for I will have subsequent videos of showing how to get information for each of these data sets. And examples of what the tableau dashboards look like. If you want to get more insight into how this data is required, and how to create the dashboards from scratch, then I highly suggest for you to take my intro to real estate and data analytics course in the course we not only cover how to analyze your market with these datasets, where you get the access to the API at the highest here. But we also go through learning Python, web scraping from scratch, like if you want to get county data through web scraping, retrieving data via API's, manipulating Housing and Economic datasets, as well touching milestones that you can actually put this on your GitHub page, your resume and talk about how you've utilized real estate data for real world problems.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and watch out for the next videos where I show you how to utilize the US housing market data API using Python. Thanks