I think that for myself, the biggest obstacle I had to holding an opinion like yours was that I was fixated on Private Equity CDO instruments slurping up houses after the 2008 crash in my old neighborhood of solid middle class houses in a DFW outer ring suburb. Don't see so much of "We Buy Ugly Houses" activity now. In my "copious" free time I need to do some number crunching of my own, as I have a relocation in my future. Your charts and figures are helping me recalibrate. Have any advice on data sources?
Zillow research/data and the IRS stats website are already on my list. In the process of tidying up the data. Some of it is pretty messy! Good ore, I think though. Gold in there, particularly their 1099 and W-2 files you're mentioning. Year over year, migration patterns should emerge.
Census was next on my list. Glad to read that they had something useful.
Yeah. I mostly just grab adjusted gross income for each ZIP code. I haven't gone much deeper into the IRS data.
Oh yeah. I forgot about the IRS migration data. It seems like I ended up using ACS data for migration stats back when I was digging into that stuff deeply because the IRS income data seemed too muddy. Moves are usually associated with selling a house, etc., which I think creates noise and bias in the reported AGI of the movers, and so I didn't feel like I could get a decent read on the incomes of the movers, but it does provide a nice estimate of the numbers.
I think that for myself, the biggest obstacle I had to holding an opinion like yours was that I was fixated on Private Equity CDO instruments slurping up houses after the 2008 crash in my old neighborhood of solid middle class houses in a DFW outer ring suburb. Don't see so much of "We Buy Ugly Houses" activity now. In my "copious" free time I need to do some number crunching of my own, as I have a relocation in my future. Your charts and figures are helping me recalibrate. Have any advice on data sources?
As always, really enjoying your newsletter.
Thanks John!
I use Zillow and the IRS for price, rent, and income estimates.
https://www.zillow.com/research/data/
https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-income-tax-statistics-2022-zip-code-data-soi
The data in the figure estimating the housing inventory is from here:
https://data.census.gov/table?q=B25032
Is there any other data source you're wondering about, or does that cover it?
Zillow research/data and the IRS stats website are already on my list. In the process of tidying up the data. Some of it is pretty messy! Good ore, I think though. Gold in there, particularly their 1099 and W-2 files you're mentioning. Year over year, migration patterns should emerge.
Census was next on my list. Glad to read that they had something useful.
Thanks!
Yeah. I mostly just grab adjusted gross income for each ZIP code. I haven't gone much deeper into the IRS data.
Oh yeah. I forgot about the IRS migration data. It seems like I ended up using ACS data for migration stats back when I was digging into that stuff deeply because the IRS income data seemed too muddy. Moves are usually associated with selling a house, etc., which I think creates noise and bias in the reported AGI of the movers, and so I didn't feel like I could get a decent read on the incomes of the movers, but it does provide a nice estimate of the numbers.