Results tagged “seattlebubble”

Seattle Bubble sees a flatline, more or less, for housing prices since this March, with a loss of 22 percent off the price peak. So the question you have to ask yourself is, is this the moment when the hero pulls himself up over the edge of the cliff and dusts himself off...or is this the moment when the branch that stopped his fall pulls loose? Barring more economic shocks, we lean towards a slow recovery. But economic shocks aren't really barred, so long as Boeing is still thrashing around, trying to get its new plane to fly.

• Seattle Bubble has some fairly depressing graphs of job losses in the region. Why, graphs, why?
• MyBallard has info on the 10,000 or so people prepared to invade Greenwood tomorrow for the 50th Annual Greenwood Seafair Parade, including links showing which streets are closed.

Seattle Bubble has the story in all its depressing details: King County foreclosures up 180 percent year-over-year.

The real estate sales report from Northwest MLS says median home prices are up 4.4 percent across the area, with King County coming in at just over $363K. Bargain homes are selling, but condos are still taking a beating. The main thing is that people are out making offers on houses, so realtors have a reason to change out of their pajamas--pending sales (offers made and accepted) are up, though a significant portion of those fail in the financing round. The Seattle Bubble has a good media-coverage round-up, and notes with some satisfaction that the rah-rah contingent is getting less play this time around.

...depending on your subscription. Business Week is bullish about Seattle burning off its excess housing inventory, while Forbes says that foreclosures are gonna keep prices in the tank. Meanwhile, Seattle Bubble is building a Google map of construction projects that have stalled out. (The Weekly's Damon Agnos beat us to the "dueling national pubs" angle. We admit it. But what if you don't read the Weekly? What then?!)

"Pending sales of single family homes in King County surged in April," reports the Seattle Times. "Pending sales...were up 25 percent from March." But what's this in the bottom half of the story: "But the number of closed single-family home sales in King County in April--1,004--represented just 60 percent of the pending sales reported in March, an unusually low share." Seattle Bubble breaks it down for you (with charts): "[P]ending sales are rapidly becoming a totally useless measure of actual market activity." Meanwhile, Aubrey Cohen notes that about 21 percent of Seattle homeowners are underwater.

The Case-Schiller Home Price Indices show the Seattle market has unwound to July 2005 valuations. The Seattle Bubble has updated its time-shifted home price comparison graph, which illustrates what happens when you remove a 17-month lag between Los Angeles/San Diego, and Seattle/Portland: the curves' slopes match up real nice.

So the developers of Thornton Place are stealing a page from Hyundai and offering to pay your mortgage for six months if you lose your job in the year after buying one of their condos.

• Finally, some good news on the horizon with regards to housing in Seattle! Seattle Bubble has the story.
• Real estate on Beacon Hill is looking promising, too, reports Beacon Hill Blog, thanks to light rail plans.
• Ballard has a lot to discuss about how the viaduct will affect their neighborhood, and My Ballard hosts the conversation. (My Ballard has an unusually active comments section, we're noticing today.)

That's the stat that jumped out at us from the Seattle Times story on our woozy real estate market; they went with "Nearly 30 percent of all homes sold at a loss at the end of 2008." So says Zillow's quarterly home value report. The King Country assessor's office data shows that "Most homes bought since mid-2005 and sold during the last three months of 2008 fetched lower prices than their owners paid." But that twenty percent underwater worries us because that's a sizable chunk who no longer have the recourse of being able to tap home equity in an emergency.

Found in our Theo Chocolates promotional newsletter this morning: "Sales of existing houses dropped more in Washington than anywhere else in the nation last quarter, compared with a year earlier, according to a new report. King County's median sale price also dropped roughly 10 percent from a year earlier." Who was saying that Seattle wasn't immune to, but typically lagged the national trends? With the drop, 57 percent of the state's first-time buyers have enough income to afford the median home price.

This morning, Cindy Zetts, the Seattle Times real estate editor, decided to head for greener pastures, which seems to say something not good about both the real estate market and the Seattle Times. It's a kind of Black Friday Remix over there, as reporters make long walks into management offices. At the Times, the involuntary staff exodus shows no signs of abating--management keeps talking about belt-tightening but without giving any sense of where the last notch on the belt might be. And as the Seattle Bubble points out (with a sadly hilarious "bottom-calling" graph), the Seattle real estate market's bottom is proving to be elusive.

(...if by "all" you mean the housing crisis.)

The P-I is running an AP story with the headline: "Seattle home sales plummet 41% from a year ago," (lede: "Seattle and Portland were among the top 10 metro areas in the nation with the most pronounced drop in sales") while the Seattle Times counters with "Record U.S. home-price decline in August attracts buyers." So there's an upside? "...sales are sluggish in formerly stable markets like the Pacific Northwest and Charlotte." Oh. At least we've got strong fundament--oh. Hey, sunny San Diego County real estate is ten percent cheaper than King County. Wait, is that good or bad?

"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.]

The mass insanity of the housing bubble over the last few years has pretty fully revealed itself by now. One need only visit our good friends over at Seattle Bubble to read about the increasing devastation. On Jan. 15, Tim posted the big news: according to the Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS), King Co. finally posted year-over-year median closing prices on housing. According to the same report, active listings are up in the YOY comparison (51%) and pending sales are down (by 33% YOY), both records. In other words, the market is flooded, demand is down, and housing prices are falling.

Did you know that there's only one credible real-estate industry voice in Seattle? It's a marketing firm in town that works with real estate developers. We've learned this from reading Aubrey Cohen's real estate reporting in the Seattle P-I. Here's a search on articles containing the exact phrase "Williams Marketing" -- they're quoted in at least one article per month since last November. (Who are the schmoes paying the P-I for ads when there's so much free ink available?)

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."

The Post Intelligencer has an article today on the pesky old buildings that dot Seattle and the heroes who have been swooping in to convert them to condos. No need to tear down a perfectly good old building, necessarily, although that sometimes works too, but you can only wring so much out of renters before you shuffle them off to Kent or something where they belong and get some buyers in there.

-If you thought high demand is responsible for high housing prices, Seattle Bubble asks you to think again.