The catalog Claude reaches into when you ask about mortgage rates, affordability, supply, rent inflation, or credit stress. Drop this skill into Claude and it knows which of FRED's 800,000 series are the 44 that actually inform a leveraged RE decision.

Reference US housing-market macro indicators from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) for real estate investment decisions. Use this skill whenever a user asks about mortgage rates, home prices, Case-Shiller, FHFA HPI, housing starts, building permits, months supply, days on market, home sales, CPI rent, owners' equivalent rent, rental vacancy, homeownership rate, unemployment, nonfarm payrolls, real disposable income, CPI, PCE, mortgage delinquency, charge-off rates, household debt service, Fed funds, Treasury yields, prime rate, yield curve, housing affordability, US housing macro, Federal Reserve data, BLS housing data, NAR data, or which economic series inform a residential RE decision. Maps 44 FRED series across 9 categories (rates_financing, prices, affordability, supply, demand, rental_market, macro_labor, inflation, credit_stress) to investor use-cases. Progressive disclosure — decision playbooks and the full 44-series reference live in `references/`.

FRED for Real Estate

What is FRED

FRED is the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis's public data portal — fred.stlouisfed.org. Free, no signup to browse, ~800,000 economic time series from the Fed, BLS, Census, Treasury, NAR, S&P, Freddie Mac, and others. For US residential real estate, it's the authoritative single stop for mortgage rates, home-price indices, affordability, employment, rent inflation, and credit conditions.

FRED is national and metro-level only. For local/ZIP pricing, use Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, or Census ACS — not FRED.

Bundled resources

Progressive disclosure rule: start with this file and the category table below. Read references/metrics.md only when a specific metric or series_id is actually needed. Read the YAML only when the markdown is insufficient.

Getting an API key

1. Create a free account at fred.stlouisfed.org/docs/api/api_key.html. Instant.
2. Set environment variable: FRED_API_KEY=your_key_here
3. Install the Python client: pip install fredapi
4. Rate limit is 120 req/min — not a concern for individual use.

Minimal Python example

import os
from fredapi import Fred
 
fred = Fred(api_key=os.environ["FRED_API_KEY"])
 
rates = fred.get_series("MORTGAGE30US")
print(rates.tail())

Swap MORTGAGE30US for any series_id from references/metrics.md.

The 9 categories

Total: 44 series. See references/metrics.md for the full list with series_ids.

Decision playbooks

Concrete "the user asked X — here's the series-id set to pull." Use these as starting points; extend when the question demands it. If a playbook names a series, references/metrics.md has the one-line rationale.

"Is now a good time to buy?" → MORTGAGE30US, FIXHAI, CSUSHPINSA, MSACSR, MEDDAYONMARUS Cost of capital, affordability index, price trajectory, supply balance, velocity. Affordability + supply together tell you leverage.

"Is a downturn coming?" → UNRATE, DGS10 vs DGS2 (yield curve), DRSFRMACBS, TDSP, PAYEMS Labor cracks first, curve inverts early, mortgage delinquencies are the coincident tell, debt-service ratio shows fragility.

"How's the rental market?" → CUSR0000SEHA, RRVRUSQ156N, RHORUSQ156N, DSPIC96 Rent inflation, vacancy (pricing power), homeownership rate (tenure shift), income (can tenants absorb raises).

"Cost of capital moving?" → DGS10, MORTGAGE30US, FEDFUNDS, DPRIME 10Y leads 30Y mortgage. Fed funds sets the floor. Prime for HELOCs.

"Supply: tight or loose?" → PERMIT, HOUST, COMPUTSA, MSACSR, ACTLISCOUUS Permits (6–12mo out) → starts (3–6mo) → completions (now). Months-supply is the balance read.

"Is rent inflation cooling?" → CUSR0000SEHA, CUSR0000SEHC01, PCEPILFE CPI rent is reported; OER is the Fed's imputed measure and the biggest shelter driver of Core PCE.

Gotchas

• Seasonal adjustment matters. Supply and demand series are usually SA (seasonally adjusted). Rates and home prices are often NSA. Don't compare SA to NSA without normalizing.
• SAAR = seasonally adjusted annual rate. A monthly reading of "1,500" housing starts means 1.5M on an annualized basis, not 1,500 in that month.
• Release lag is real. Case-Shiller ~2 months, FHFA quarterly, real median HH income ~9 months. Don't report stale data as current.
• FIXHAI only retains 13 months on FRED per NAR's agreement. For longer series, pull from NAR directly.
• FRED is national/metro only. Don't use these series for ZIP or neighborhood decisions. Pair with Zillow/Redfin/Census.
• Two versions of Fed funds. DFF is daily, FEDFUNDS is monthly. Use daily for news-driven analysis, monthly for charts.

Source of truth

This skill is derived from TiRE's canonical catalog at agents/data/fred-series.yaml. The YAML is hand-curated; every entry has a why_it_matters rationale that feeds both this skill and TiRE's research agents.

When the upstream catalog changes, regenerate references/metrics.md and references/fred-series.yaml. v1 is hand-curated; build script deferred until drift is observed.