Real Estate's Going Up! Up! Up!

It's become fairly commonplace for the brighter real estate bloggers, like Timothy "The Tim" Ellis over at SeattleBubble, to mock P-I reporter Aubrey Cohen once a month. See Cohen--the P-I's lead real estate reporter--writes an article about the state of the national housing market once a month when the industry standard Case-Shiller numbers are released. The Case-Shiller index (from S&P) tracks the changes in home prices for 20 US metropolitan areas each month as compared to a year prior and is the benchmark index for real estate performance.

The problem, as Tim has noted time and time again, is that every month Cohen (and a number of other business journalists) interpret the data glowingly even as the handbasket descends into the fiery inferno. He even came up with a name for the trope: the "Seattle is special" story. The logic behind Cohen's work was essentially that although many other metro areas' prices were stagnant or falling, Seattle's continued to rise, albeit more slowly. As Tim has shown time and time again by charting the Case-Shiller numbers, Seattle has been following the exact same trajectory, just several months later than other cities.

So Cohen's report in today's P-I is doubly hilarious. After refusing to admit Seattle's housing market was going the same way the rest of the country was for months despite the growing certainty of a massive slowdown in the wake of the sub-prime market collapse, this month, with Seattle's prices having slipped below Charlotte, N.C.'s, the new interpretation is that, in fact, this is good.

"Slower pace seen as healthier than double-digit growth" trumpets the sub-head.

That claim comes from Glenn Crellin, of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at WSU, who told Cohen it was "healthier and more sustainable." Never mind that Maureen Maitland, V.P. of index analyses at Standard & Poor's, interpreted the stats as suggesting "that Seattle may be headed a little more south." We wouldn't want good analysis to get in the way of misguided market bullishness, now would we?

"When Condo's Attack" by ERIK98122 from our Flickr pool.