Quote from OldTrader:
You're absolutely right...it's not much of a chart. Part of the problem is what SteveD mentions above, that there is no particular uniformity in the real estate "market". We don't know what a "3 bedroom house" sells for, because it sells for one thing in the suburbs, another thing downtown, one price in one subdivision versus another. So what the real estate people have done is come up with this "median price". Now, even that concept is flawed in a way because what a median price was years ago is different today because as time has gone along houses have been built differently, bigger, more expensively, different amenities, etc etc...thus raising the median price. So if you compare today's median price with the median price 10 years ago, you aren't comparing apples to apples. There has likely been appreciation of course...but maybe not to the extent that the figures would show because of the change in the way that a house is built.
All in all, the chart is not like a chart that we look at everyday on a stock. In fact, the chart does not exist for real estate like what we see in a stock because the uniformity is not there in real estate.
That said, with all it's flaws, I think the chart does give some information. For instance, we know that on a nationwide basis for the period covered real estate has never gone down. And keep in mind that this period covers the early 80's when interest rates went to 20%. We can also see that nationwide gains were higher back in the 70's than they are now....which is interesting since everyone is calling this period a "bubble".
What doesn't show is that California real estate went down in the 90's. Texas and Colorado in the 80's. In other words, regional declines, not nationwide.
But if you want to use this chart like you might use a stock chart, it really isn't the same thing.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
OldTrader