"We're Unsinkable!": Local Newspaper Downplays Nationwide Condo Slump

If you're in the mood for some wide-eyed, Kool-Aid stained boosterism, look no further than this article in today's P-I. It's in response to the New York Times piece announcing a condo-sales slump. The tone is strictly "move along, nothing to see here."

It begins:

Seattle's market was not to blame for a recent decision to change a planned 34-story downtown building from condominiums to apartments.

Rather, the slumping condo markets in cities such as Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Miami and Boston affected the national firms that fund such buildings, said John Schwartz, northwest regional director of Keller CMS, which is managing the Terry Avenue Apartments project.

But thanks to some ingenious digging by the reporter, we then get the good news that all is well in Seattle from Williams Marketing, a Seattle firm that works with condo developers. Sweet.

Seattle real estate professionals and economists agree that the city's job creation, relative lack of speculators and the fact that its boom never rose as high as other places kept its housing market healthy.

If, as the phrasing suggests, reporter Aubrey Cohen personally canvassed all of Seattle's real estate professionals and economists to determine their agreement on this point, Aubrey deserves a free fucking drink! Certainly Williams Marketing does.

For details, the story refers again to its primary source: Williams Marketing. Boston, they point out, overbuilt, with something like 600 condo projects in development (in its metropolitan area). Seattle, much less. (No qualification of metropolitan area or not. No benchmarking to indicate the difference in market size. No analysis of actual demand in Seattle.)

The news that "a record 7,000 apartments in 143 buildings in King, Pierce and Snohomish counties went condo in 2006 or were scheduled to do so soon" is tagged onto the end of the article. Almost as if condo conversions and new starts weren't both part of the overall condo market. (See the Stranger's ECB on Seattle's condo conversion rate.)

To close, we simply note that the P-I article asks you to believe that condo developers in the nation's leading real estate markets were unable to read their markets correctly. Perhaps they are new to the business. However, in Seattle, this is not the case. Here there is no guesswork involved. A marketing professional assures us there is nothing to be concerned about.

We think back to White Star Line's advertising Titanic as "practically unsinkable" -- except the word "practically" was edited out, leaving only the word "unsinkable." It's not that we know there is or isn't a condo bubble -- it's just that with reporting like this, who would ever guess a bubble was even possible?

[UPDATE: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Seattle Bubble blog had a similar response to the article. If we'd known they'd beaten us to it, we would have just linked and devoted our full energy to the snark component. *sigh* On the plus side, this surely represents a consensus among all real estate bloggers that the bubble-end is nigh.]