Markets
Map: Where Real Estate Prices are Rising Fastest
Mapped: Where Real Estate Prices are Rising the Fastest
The real estate market is a location game.
While forces like interest rates, demographics, and the economy help drive the housing market as a whole, the strength of your local market depends on other factors closer to home.
When you zoom out to look at U.S. real estate from a bird’s eye view, you’ll see this regional variance in full effect. Some markets are booming while others are tanking, and the contrast between the winners and losers is a stark one.
Real Estate Booms
Today’s infographic comes from TitleMax, and it shows where real estate prices are appreciating and depreciating the fastest.
We’ll start on the high end: here are the 10 cities that have seen the highest absolute growth in terms of price per square foot over the last five years.
Rank | City | State | Price change (per sq. ft) |
---|---|---|---|
#1 | Beverly Hills | CA | +$764.43 |
#2 | Fisher Island | FL | +$493.16 |
#3 | Mountain View | CA | +$452.67 |
#4 | San Carlos | CA | +$419.87 |
#5 | Cupertino | CA | +$418.44 |
#6 | Sunnyvale | CA | +$408.66 |
#7 | San Francisco | CA | +$381.16 |
#8 | San Mateo | CA | +$370.61 |
#9 | Santa Monica | CA | +$364.48 |
#10 | Manhattan Beach | CA | +$363.11 |
Median home price change over 5-years, measured in price per sq. ft (Source: Zillow)
The only non-California locale to make it onto the list is Fisher Island in Miami, Florida, which is home to just 467 residents including Andre Agassi, Oprah Winfrey, and Robert Herjavec.
While these are absolute increases, it’s worth noting that they are still very significant in relative terms. For example, although it’s true that Beverley Hills is the most expensive housing market in the U.S., prices have risen 47% over the last five years.
Real Estate Busts
Things may be rosy in the Golden State, but there are also places spread throughout the country where prices are dropping fast.
Many of these are smaller, lesser-known locales – and while they are located all over the map, eight of them are in states along the Eastern Seaboard.
Rank | City | State | Price change (per sq. ft) |
---|---|---|---|
#1 | Sunset | SC | -$64.31 |
#2 | Sharon | CT | -$63.21 |
#3 | Lake Toxaway | NC | -$56.32 |
#4 | Atlantic City | NJ | -$54.16 |
#5 | Somers Point | NJ | -$43.99 |
#6 | Ticonderoga | NY | -$39.64 |
#7 | Hamburg | NJ | -$38.11 |
#8 | Glenbrook | NV | -$34.36 |
#9 | Winsted | CT | -$34.23 |
#10 | Mercer | WI | -$31.69 |
Median home price change over 5-years, measured in price per sq. ft (Source: Zillow)
A Stark Contrast
If you sold a 1,000 sq. ft condo in Beverley Hills – the country’s most expensive real estate market – it would likely net you about $1.6 million.
What could you buy for that in Tamaqua, PA, the country’s cheapest?
In theory, you could pick up roughly 71,000 sq. ft of real estate – that’s about 10 mansions worth, or just short of the size of an average Walmart.
Markets
Visualizing the Rise of the U.S. Dollar Since the 19th Century
This animated graphic shows the U.S. dollar, the world’s primary reserve currency, as a share of foreign reserves since 1900.

Visualizing the Rise of the U.S. Dollar Since the 19th Century
As the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar made up 58.4% of foreign reserves held by central banks in 2022, falling near 25-year lows.
Today, emerging countries are slowly decoupling from the greenback, with foreign reserves shifting to currencies like the Chinese yuan.
At the same time, the steep appreciation of the U.S. dollar is leading countries to sell their U.S. foreign reserves to help prop up their currencies, in turn buying currencies such as the Australian and Canadian dollars to help generate higher yields.
The above animated graphic from James Eagle shows the rapid ascent of the U.S. dollar over the last century, and its gradual decline in recent years.
Dollar Dominance: A Brief History
In 1944, the U.S. dollar became the world’s reserve currency under the Bretton Woods Agreement. Over the first half of the century, the U.S. ran budget surpluses while increasing trade and economic ties with war-torn countries, expanding its influence as the world’s store of value.
Later through the 1960s, the U.S. dollar share of global foreign reserves rapidly increased as political allies stockpiled the dollar.
By 2000, dollar dominance hit a peak of 71% of global reserves. With the creation of the European Union a year earlier, countries such as China began increasing the share of euros in reserves. Between 2000 and 2005, the share of the dollar in China’s foreign exchange reserves fell by an estimated 15 percentage points.
The dollar began a long rally after the global financial crisis, which drove central banks to cut their dollar reserves to help bolster their currencies.
Fast-forward to today, and dollar reserves have fallen roughly 13 percentage points from their historical peak.
The State of the World’s Reserve Currency
In 2022, 16% of Russia’s export transactions were in yuan, up from almost nothing before the war. Brazil and Argentina have also begun adopting the Chinese currency for trade or reserve purposes. Still, the U.S. dollar makes up 80% of Brazil’s reserves.
Yet while the U.S. dollar has decreased in share of foreign reserves, it still has an immense influence in the world economy.
The majority of trade is invoiced in the U.S. dollar globally, a trend that has stayed fairly consistent over many decades. Between 1999-2019, 74% of trade in Asia was invoiced in dollars and in the Americas, it made up 96% of all invoicing.
Furthermore, almost 90% of foreign exchange transactions involve the U.S. dollar thanks to its liquidity.
However, countries are increasingly finding alternative options than the dollar. Today, Western businesses have begun settling trade with China in renminbi. Looking further ahead, digital currencies could provide options that don’t include the U.S. dollar.
Even more so, if the U.S. share of global GDP continues to shrink, the shift to a multipolar system could progress over this century.
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