Zillow's Two Zents On The Seattle Market

Zillow is apparently not content to simply zestimate the value of your neighbor's house. Either that or they've been out of blog headlines for a few weeks and are finding it oh so cold out there. Seattlest got an email just now pointing us to Zillow's quarterly home value reports for five different cities, and since Zillow is here, one of those cities is Seattle. (Not every email that shows up in Seattlest's inbox shows up on the site, of course, but since we'd like to stake a claim someday, a home values report for Seattle is interesting to us. According to this report, it's much more likely that we'll eventually stake that claim somewhere like South Park than our current hood of Wallingford. And thank god.)

The preamble is remarkably unremarkable if you haven't been in a hole for the past month or so:

Home price appreciation in the Seattle metropolitan region (King, Pierce and Snohomish counties) remained strong through the second quarter of 2006. The Zindex home value indicator for single-family homes rose to $337,541 in the second quarter, a 12.2% annualized increase from the prior quarter. While strong, particularly by national standards where appreciation has slowed considerably in many top markets, the rate of appreciation was slightly off the annual appreciation rate 5.8%.

Blah, blah, blah. It gets more interesting, though, when it gets into the neighborhoods that have seen poor appreciation or even depreciation recently, all or which happen to surround (and include) downtown: Georgetown, I.D., Broadway, and Downtown.