Economic Snapshot Overview by Dr. Reid Cummings - March 2020
Posted on March 27, 2020 by Dr. Reid Cummings
Greetings, and welcome to the March 2020 Mobile Bay Economic Snapshot.
Over the last two years, our menu of dynamic, user-driven dashboards has grown into a robust collection of key local, regional, and national datapoints. The primary objective in designing each new dashboard is to produce a platform that not only highlights key metrics, but that also presents data in an easy to understand, visually interesting, and hopefully, thought provoking manner. Our efforts remind us time and again that data can usually tell more than one story. The key is in the framing.
This month we are proud to introduce our newest offering: The Trend Report. In this issue we use a series of dashboards to illustrate key trends in area real estate markets over the last five years. It is interesting to note that the measures we now present come from the same datasets used to report previous years’ sales activity. Simply illustrating the data differently enables us to tell another story.
Our four-dashboard set illustrates the following key trends in the home sales markets of Baldwin and Mobile Counties over the last five years. Our dashboards illustrate that:
- The top location for Baldwin County new home sales shifted from Foley to Daphne over the last five years.
- Beginning in 2018, Daphne led Baldwin County in the total number of all home sales while Fairhope kept its lead in total sales value.
- Most Mobile County new homes sold in the western areas of the county.
- County-wide in Mobile County, over half of all home sales concentrated in 7 out of 26 areas.
These days it seems everyone is even more inundated than usual with ever-dizzying arrays of data. It can at times make one wonder how to make sense of it all. Although we have no answer for that broadening dilemma, rest assured we will continue to do our part by helping to make sense of just a bit of it. Until next time, from everyone at the Center, we wish you and yours all the best.