If you live on the West coast, you've probably noticed that houses seem more expensive than they do in other areas of the country.



This graph shows the relative cost of housing by county in the U.S. Dark red represents those counties with median housing values close to the maximum for that year. Dark blue represents counties with some of the lowest housing costs. White represents counties with no data. Like distributions found in other fields, housing data follows a highly exponential distribution. This makes it difficult to graph housing the differences in the price of housing between counties without simply coloring the richest and poorest neighborhoods. To get around this problem, these colors are exponentially weighted. In addition to making the distribution of prices more linear, this also allows the human eye to more appropriately examine differnces between regions. Without such weighting, the eye tends to only notice the most extreme colors.

Below is a static image for the most recent year for which I could find data. How does your county compare to the others?



Data Source: www.zillow.com/blog/research/data/‎