Real Estate Slump Happening Here After All
"Home buyers, it's time to haggle," admits the P-I, going on to point out that King County's median house-sales price has dropped 6.2% from a year ago. Seattle is down 2.7%. [Caveat: Discussions of market valuation don't directly relate to the particular house you are thinking about buying. Any specific house can be over- or under-valued in a given market. So take all of this with a grain of salt.]
On his blog, but not in the newspaper, reporter Aubrey Cohen covers ZipRealty CEO Pat Lashinsky saying in US News & World Report that Seattle's slumpiest season was still on the horizon.
In Seattle, if you look at it right now, on a year-over-year basis, you will see that inventory levels [of unsold homes] are up between 45 and 50 percent. And then if you looked at prices—in the price report that just came out—it would say that prices are down in Seattle by 4 percent. This is exactly what we saw in the rest of the country six to nine months ago.The Seattle Bubble blog backs this up with NWMLS stats for May: Active Listings: up 42% YOY, Pending Sales: down 39% YOY (new record). Then, piling on, Tim Ellis mentions that research firm Global Insight estimates that the Seattle housing market is overvalued by 22.8%, and provides a laugh-out-loud summary of Q1 stories that tried to link open-house traffic with a market turnaround.
For sheer megaphone-to-ass frivolity, nothing can beat the close of Cohen's own article, though:
The price drop has "already happened," said Mike Skahen, broker of Lake & Co. Real Estate. "It's a great time to negotiate with sellers." He reported a noticeable pickup in close-in Seattle markets and blamed overall slowness of the area on negative press.Dick Beeson, broker/owner of Windermere/Commencement Associates, in Tacoma, pointed to the gray weather. "We still haven't had summer hit us yet as the weather remains cool, wet and cloudy," he said in the release. "I expect both temperatures and the market to heat up as summer approaches."
Photo-that-says-it-all courtesy of Seattlest pool member Brappy, who also blogged about the bubble popping. Thanks, Brappy! That's a hell of a shot.
