By The Tim on November 6th, 2009 at 8:00 AM · 39 Comments
Time for the monthly reporting roundup, where I read all the local paper rehashes of the NWMLS press release so you don’t have to.
Here’s a link to this month’s NWMLS press release: Tax credit spurs big surge in Western Washington home sales
Before we get into the roundup, I’d like to take a moment to quote an excerpt from the monthly NWMLS data post from May, which was titled Huge Gap Opening Between Pending and Closed Sales (a subject that I first brought to your attention in August of last year).
The disconnect between pending sales and closed sales grows ever larger. … Something is becoming extremely fishy about the pending sales data.
…it is good to keep in mind when you start reading news reports in the coming weeks about the market supposedly picking back up. It’s an illusion.
Here’s a graphical representation of the 2009 sales illusion:
Pending sales peaked at 2,447 in June, while so far closed sales have not made it higher than 1,758—a nearly 30% discrepancy. So far this year there have been at total of 20,025 pending SFH sales in King County, but only 12,986 actual closed sales. In other words, more than a third (35%) of pending sales have yet to materialize into closed sales. That difference is typically well under 10%.
Find me a newspaper that reported this growing issue last August.
Click below for this month’s roundup of gawking at the tax credit.
[Read more →]
Categories: News
Tags: Benbow, Boone, bottom-calling, Crellin, Everett_Herald, JohnLScott, Kearsley, Olympian, Pryne, reporting_roundup, Seattle_PI, Seattle_Times, Spratt, Tacoma_Tribune, tax credit
By The Tim on November 5th, 2009 at 12:32 PM · 58 Comments
Let’s have a look at October market statistics from the NWMLS. Here’s the NWMLS press release: Tax credit spurs big surge in Western Washington home sales.
Here’s your King County SFH summary, with the arrows to show whether the year-over-year direction of each indicator is positive or negative news for buyers and sellers:
| October 2009 |
Number |
MOM |
YOY |
Buyers |
Sellers |
| Active Listings |
8,869 |
-5.2% |
-19.7% |
 |
 |
| Closed Sales |
1,758 |
+8.7% |
+33.3% |
|
|
| SAAS (?) |
1.61 |
-11.4% |
-27.9% |
|
|
| Pending Sales |
2,295 |
+0.3% |
+72.9% |
|
|
| Months of Supply |
3.86 |
-5.5% |
-53.6% |
|
|
| Median Price* |
$377,500 |
-1.2% |
-3.7% |
|
|
In a great big surprise to absolutely nobody, closed sales bumped up in a seasonally unnatural pattern in October, no doubt due to the belief many buyers had that the $8,000 tax credit would be expiring at the end of November (it is now foolishly being renewed and extended, pushed through Congress on the back of an unrelated extension of unemployment benefits).
At this point it still looks unlikely that closed sales will manage to break through the 2,000 mark this year. In the past, closed sales have fallen an average of 15% from October to November. I suspect that this year we may see sales hold steady or possibly even post a slight increase, but a 14% increase would be surprising, especially with the tax credit now having been extended.
Here’s how the closed sales situation is shaping up compared to previous years:
Thanks to an apparent abundance of eager homebuyers that aren’t very good at math, closed sales made a clear break from the trend seen every other year since 2000, ticking up from September to October. I expect a similar market distortion to appear next month as well.
Feel free to download the updated Seattle Bubble Spreadsheet, and here’s a copy in Excel 2003 format. Click below for the rest of the usual monthly graphs.
[Read more →]
Categories: Statistics
Tags: NWMLS, SAAS, Statistics
By The Tim on November 4th, 2009 at 8:23 AM · 110 Comments
A reader wrote in requesting an update to this February post, in which I criticized Nancy Pelosi’s misleading chart of job losses.
Here’s an update to the post-WWII job loss chart, courtesy of Calculated Risk, in which I’ve added a mark so you can see where the “stimulus” was passed.
Wow, good thing we changed direction to the tune of $787 billion*, huh?
*(Actual cost: much, much more)
If there is any doubt about who the stimulus was really directed at saving, just take a look at an update to the stock market crash comparison:
Woo, go Wall Street!
Finally, speaking of bailouts for Wall Street and the banks: Congress Poised to Keep Homebuyers’ Tax Credit
The Senate and House are poised to agree on a compromise measure to extend unemployment benefits that also would expand a popular $8,000 tax credit for homebuyers, despite a recent government report on extensive mistakes and suspected fraud in the program.
The Senate might pass its version as early as Wednesday, and aides to Congressional leaders say the House could accept it this week, sending the bill to President Obama to sign into law. After weeks of partisan delay in the Senate, Democrats are eager to show progress before Friday, when the October jobless report is again expected to show high unemployment.
Super! So while people continue to lose their jobs, and absolutely zero of the underlying problems in the economy have been fixed, let’s pour another ten or twenty billion dollars into the housing market to try to keep prices propped up (i.e. – keep homes as unaffordable as possible) a little longer so our buddies in the big banks that got us into this mess can avoid taking losses.
Sounds like a plan to me!
Categories: Opinion · Statistics
Tags: depression, Jobs, recession, unemployment
By The Tim on November 3rd, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 26 Comments
Now that October is behind us, let’s have a look at the monthly stats preview. Most of the charts below are based on broad county-wide data that is available through a simple search of King County Records. If you have additional stats you’d like to see in the “preview,” drop a line in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.
Here’s your preview of October’s foreclosure and home sale stats:
First up, total home sales as measured by the number of “Warranty Deeds” filed with the county:
County sales as measured by warranty deeds were up significantly (16.7%) from last year in October, and marked another month-to-month increase (5.2%). This is no surprise, since as I mentioned last month, the impending expiration of the $8,000 mortgage subsidy is definitely having an effect on the people who have been duped into thinking we have already hit bottom.
Next, here’s Notices of Trustee sale, which are an indication of the number of homes currently in the foreclosure process:
Foreclosure notices actually declined from September, which could signal either an easing in the foreclosure “crisis” or possibly just a continued lag as the pipeline from SB 5810 continues to fill. We probably won’t really know for sure which one it is until sometime next year.
Here’s another measure of foreclosures, looking at Trustee Deeds, which is the type of document filed with the county when the bank actually repossesses a house through the trustee auction process. Note that there are other ways for the bank to repossess a house that result in different documents being filed, such as when a borrower “turns in the keys” and files a “Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure.”
A new record high in October, lagging the peak month for Trustee Sale notices by four months.
Lastly, here’s an approximate guess at where the month-end inventory was, based on our sidebar inventory tracker (powered by Estately):
Looks like listings will be down around 13% year-over-year, and 6% month-to-month.
Stay tuned later this month a for more detailed look at each of these metrics as the “official” data is released from various sources.
Categories: Statistics
Tags: county-records, foreclosures, inventory, Notice of Trustee Sale, preview, sales, Statistics, trustee-deeds, warranty-deeds
Seattle Bubble Commenters: Thank You!
By The Tim on November 5th, 2009 at 6:00 AM · 69 Comments
Seattle Bubble hit a geeky milestone yesterday, with the posting of its 0×10000th comment! That’s hexadecimal—base 16—65,536 for you non-geeks out there. The 0×10000th comment was posted by Flying Ape.
In commemoration of this geeky occasion, here are a few statistics relating to the comments on Seattle Bubble.
As of the 0×10000th comment, 65,536 comments had been posted across a total of 1,852 posts, for an average of 35 comments per post. Seattle Bubble was launched on August 5, 2005, so that’s an average of 42 comments per day.
Stupid spam robots have attempted (and failed) to post 89,069 (0×15BED) spam comments, outnumbering comments by real people 1.4 to 1. And that’s just since Seattle Bubble’s move to its own domain in May 2007, meaning that the spambots (failed to) post an average of 99 comments per day. Yikes!
Top 10 most-commented posts:
Top
1012 most prolific commenters:[Update: There was a glitch in the auto-generated top ten that caused some commenters' count to be split. I have updated the list to correct for this error.]
Technically, “Anonymous” was #1 with 2,651 comments (a throwback to Seattle Bubble’s old days at Blogger.com), but since that’s not really a single person, it doesn’t count. What’s really impressive about Kary’s spot at #1 is that he only just started commenting on Seattle Bubble in July of last year, so in less than 16 months he has managed to rack up nearly twice as many comments as the next-closest competitor (not counting myself), averaging 5.4 comments per day.
And let’s not leave out the forum!
Top 10 forum posters:
A giant THANK YOU goes out to everyone that participates in the discussion here at Seattle Bubble. I have learned a lot from you, and I think on the whole we have made a positive contribution to the understanding and demystifying of real estate and related economic issues in the Seattle area. I hope that we can continue the conversation for many 0×1000s of comments to come. ;^)
→ 69 CommentsCategories: Features
Tags: comments, forum