FRED recently added county-level data on house prices. As with a lot of regional data, it’s best to look at it on our mapping tool, GeoFRED, which lets you visualize the distribution and the evolution of economic and socio-demographic statistics. One particularly interesting thing you can do with these new data is to replay the housing crisis of 2007-2008. The map shows the change in house prices that took place in 2006: The darker areas show the counties where growth was the highest, mostly the West and Florida. The maps below* show the change in 2007, when the West Coast and Florida were suddenly the areas with the lowest growth, and in 2008, when this downturn expanded to most of the West. If you go to GeoFRED, you can cycle through more years and see how crisis unfolded.

* Note that the colors in these maps denote lower values.

How these maps were created: The original post referenced interactive maps from our now discontinued GeoFRED site. The revised post provides replacement maps from FRED’s new mapping tool. To create FRED maps, go to the data series page in question and look for the green “VIEW MAP” button at the top right of the graph. See this post for instructions to edit a FRED map. Only series with a green map button can be mapped.

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.