Dallas and Forth Worth have inverse 50-year construction trends. How should we interpret these trend lines?

According to our 50-year construction trend data, Fort Worth is increasingly bullish on new development, while Dallas is not so much. If we started the trend line in 1990, the two cities would look similar. Trend lines are tricky.

How to find meaning in trend lines?

For example, the blue dotted line from 2010 to 2020 is a ten-year trend line. In both cities, it extends to predict that construction activity will grow. However, as we all know, this was not the case. After 2020, there was a pandemic, and this upward trend did not continue. 

Trend lines versus regression and the most exciting discovery.

Surprisingly, the prediction of the Deepblocks machine learning models, the green dashed lines, moves downward after 2020. They’ve captured a series of ten-year trends of economic recessions. According to 50 years of data, the current downturn was in the cards, pandemic or not. More about the insights within construction activity in our last post.

What is a 50-year trend line?

For those unfamiliar with trend lines, we use trend lines to understand the general direction of a series of points. In this case, points represent the number of square feet built in a specific year, and a dark solid line joins those points. The red double line represents the 50-year trend line, in other words, the general direction of all the points over time. 

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