I rediscovered the maps and work of Alasdair Rae this morning. (He has appeared on this blog before in posts like this one here.) Alasdair works in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield and is author of the blog, Stats, Maps n Pix. Recently, he's been publishing maps showing population densities around the world. He also gets into the details of how they're made. They are pretty cool to see.

Here are the Great Lakes.

And here is Brazil, as well as a map of the world (without any land shown). Canada and the United States barely register on this second one.

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the median home price across the United States rose 8% year-over-year in March to $280,600. One explanation for this is that while, yes, demand did drop off, so too did supply and that has led to a shortage of available housing. The other possible explanation is that these March deals were papered earlier in the year (or late last year) when most of us were blissfully unaware of what was about to happen and so the real impact of this pandemic isn't yet showing up in these numbers.

Let's drill down.

The Toronto Regional Real Estate Board also released numbers today, but for the month of April. Not surprisingly, residential resales across the region are down by 67% compared to April 2019. The number of listings is also down by a similar amount (-64.1%). Overall though, pricing remained relatively flat (0.1% increase). And by overall I mean for all housing types and for all areas of the region. There are larger variances within specific areas and for certain types. See below.

Drilling down even further, my friend and agent Christopher Bibby noted in his monthly newsletter over the weekend that transaction volumes in the central (resale) condominium market are down some 85-90%. So the market is effectively at a standstill. Those who do not need to sell or move are justifiably deciding not to right now. But just as Warren Buffet got on stage over the weekend -- with some great flowy hair, I might add -- and told us in Times New Roman never to bet against America, I am not about to bet against Toronto. This too shall pass.

Every quarter, Apartment List publishes something that they call their Rental Migration Report. What they do is use search data from their website to determine where their (registered) users are hoping to move to and from. Their first report of 2020 is now out and below is their list of the most attractive US metros. It is based on search data from June to December, 2019.

Now, it’s important to note that this is really only a form of intent — taken from one particular website. This list may not, and probably doesn’t, accurately mirror how and where people are actually migrating within the US. But it is still interesting to see what is top of mind for Apartment List’s users. (If there were multiple search inquiries during a visit to the site, they counted the first metro area.)

Beautiful mountains. Great snowboarding/skiing. And a burgeoning tech ecosystem. I am not at all surprised to see Denver at the top of this list.

Images: Apartment List