A Slow Look at Redfin's Best Time to Buy Chart
May 9, 2026 • 5 min read
Came across this chart from Redfin and Home Economics this week. The colors are tasteful, the grid lines are barely there, and nothing competes for your attention. There's also a lot going on once you start looking, so it's worth slowing down to break it down.
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How it's built
Two stacked beeswarm panels share a single x-axis of months. This setup, called small multiples, makes the panels easy to compare side by side.
If beeswarms are new to you: each dot is one data point, arranged around an axis so they don't overlap. The overall distribution becomes visible at a glance, including where values cluster, where they thin out, and where the outliers sit.
I recommend beeswarms to analytics or marketing teams that want to look beyond the average. Salary by department, response time by region, conversion by cohort: anywhere the spread itself is the story.
An annotation in the corner reads "Each bubble is one metro area." No individual city is labeled, and no callouts tell you which dot is Phoenix or Boise. The chart is about the collective, not any one city.
Reading the chart
The y-axis is an index, with each value shown relative to a baseline of 1.0. The 1.0 line is labeled as the average directly on the chart, which keeps an otherwise abstract scale readable.
Each panel measures one thing, named in its subtitle. The top panel tracks fresh active listings, defined as anything on the market for less than 60 days. The bottom panel tracks buyer leverage, the gap between actual sale price and original listed price.
Two annotations on the bottom panel keep the direction unambiguous:
Each dot also encodes two more variables. Size scales with city size, so NYC reads visually heavier than Boise. Color is a simple cutoff at the average line: above goes blue, below goes red, on both panels.
In Redfin's framing, more fresh listings and bigger concessions both favor buyers, so blue means a buyer's month for that city and red means a seller's.
Design choices
A few details keep all of this readable. Grid lines are low-opacity, so they stay out of the way and keep your focus on the spread. The y-axis tick labels sit on top of the gridline ends rather than to their left, which saves horizontal space on smaller screens.
The legend sits right under the title, so by the time your eye reaches the dots, you already know what blue and red mean.
What I'd push on
The two y-axes don't share a scale. The top panel runs from 0.6 to 1.2, while the bottom runs from 0.0 to 2.0. That means the same visual distance from the average line represents very different things on each panel, and if you don't catch it, you can easily read the bottom panel's wider spread as more dramatic variation than it really is, or assume the two panels are telling proportional stories when they aren't.
