Another Picture, Another Thousand Words Saved

The experts at S&P/Case-Shiller make a valuable data set of housing prices available online here.  By chance or design, their index uses January 2000 as a baseline ("100" on the index), and that is just about the tipping point where houses went from being a boring asset class to a go-go bubble class.  You can graph their data (each line is a different metro area in the US) and get the full fireworks and confetti effect:

Of course there's some dispersion on the left -- pictured like this there's a suggestion of convergence which is illusory, really what you're seeing is the effect of the January 2000 baselining.  But the drama is on the right side, when evertying goes crazy.  Prices are not back down to their 2000 levels, but this shows just how extraordinary the run-up was, and gives you a sense of the pain being felt by anyone who took out a mortgage in the last four or five years.