[Housing Bubble]

Zillow is Amazing.

Via Kevin Drum, there's a new site that has both personal and national political implications: zillow. It is a catalogue of 60 million homes and their value over time. For homeowners--buyers and sellers--there's a feature that allows you to see the appreciation (or, I suppose depreciation) of a single property, neighborhood, or county. This is enormously useful to learning how to price a home or whether the price on a home you're looking at is reasonable. Plus, it's packed with data on individual homes.

In terms of a larger political context, have a look at the national graph. This charts the housing prices across the country since mid '01. You can see the prices start really ticking off there in 2004--but look what happened at the end of last year--the trend flatlines.

Regional markets, however, are behaving differently. California's graph looks a lot like the nation, but Oregon's is still ticking up. Michigan's is declining. Weirest of all, Massachussett's is flatlining, except for a weird little dip around December of last year.

So we can get a real-time sense of what the markets are looking like, which will make armchair prognosticators like me very happy.