"The Bigger Picture for U.S. Real Estate"

We could title just about every post from Political Calculations (whom I once described as 'quirky')* "Data Mania" but that would get repetitive so we'll just swipe his headline.
From Political Calculations, June 3:

Now that we have Sentier Research's report on median household income for the U.S. in April 2014, we're now able to update our charts showing the evolution of the second U.S. housing bubble as it has progressed through its inflation phase. Our first chart looks at the relationship between the trailing twelve month average of median new home sale prices and median household income since December 2000, which allows us to directly compare the second U.S. housing bubble with the first:

With the trailing twelve month average of median new home sale prices falling for the second time in three months, the data suggests that we are seeing the second U.S. housing bubble continue to go through a peaking process.

We should note that we don't necessarily expect the same kind of deflation process that followed the peaking of the first U.S. housing bubble. The April 2014 data indicated that while median new home sale prices fell, the quantity of new homes sold rose. That combination is somewhat healthier than the outright collapse in both sales and prices that defined the deflation phase of the first U.S. housing bubble.

To put the state of the bubble market into the historical context of what a non-bubble driven housing market looks like, our next chart expands the time frame of the first chart back to 1967, which corresponds to the oldest data directly published by the U.S. Census Bureau's on the median income earned by all U.S. households.

Our final chart goes back four years further in time, to December 1963, to capture the oldest data we have showing the trailing twelve month average of median new home sale prices since that time....MUCH MORE

*From our 2009 post "Demographically Driven Inflation and Deflation":

Political Calculations is quirky. On the one hand they link to Prof. Shiller's merged Cowles/S&P data (first rate scholarship/database). On the other they do a "On the Moneyed Midways" linkfest that seems aimed at a totally different target audience. Here's an example of the former...