Friends of Seattle Bubble
Weekly Twitter Digest (Link Roundup) for 2013-05-17
- The Mastro drama continues… "Seized Mastro jewelry valued at $3 million" http://t.co/vK3CMxNbrX via @seattletimes ->
Rate this post:
00Bank-Owned Sales Drop Below 20% in SW King County
Here’s one more chart on the share of sales that were bank-owned homes. This one shows the share of sales that were bank-owned broken down by the NWMLS-defined regions.
In this chart I’ve grouped zip codes into their approximate NWMLS regions, which break South County into SE King and SW King and display Seattle and N King separately.
Southwest King County is still much more distressed than the other regions, but steep declines in the last two months have dropped its share of bank-owned sales from 28% in February to just 19% in April. Seattle and the Eastside have decreased as well, and now sit at just 2.4% and 3.3% respectively.
After shooting up from 1.4% in December to 11.9% in March, bank-owned sales fell to 9.0% of the total in North King County in April.
Overall, the effects of distressed inventory and sales are mostly behind us in the Seattle area, save for Southwest King County, which still seems to have a bit to work through this year.
Rate this post:
+10Non-Distressed Median Price per SqFt Up 4.2% from 2012
As promised yesterday, it’s time to check up on median home sale prices broken down by distress status: Non-distressed, bank-owned, and short sales.
As of April, the non-distressed median price for King County single family home sales sits at $444,000, up 6.5% from a year earlier and up 3.3% from March. Last year the month-over-month increase was about the same, up 3.0% March to April.
The bank-owned median sale price was at $200,100 in April, up 9.9% from a year earlier. The short sale median price came in at $255,100 in April, up 6.3% from 2012.
Here’s a look at the price per square foot broken down by distress status:
The median price per square foot of non-distressed homes was up just 4.2% from 2012. The bank-owned median price per square foot shot up a whopping 20.7%, while the short sale median price per square foot was up 7.4%.
It seems that most of the big price gains right now are in bank-owned homes, while the overall median is increasing more dramatically thanks to the overall shift away from the cheaper distressed properties.
Rate this post:
+20Bank-Owned Sales Inched Down Again in April
Let’s take another look at what share of the monthly sales are being distressed sales—bank-owned and short sales. In April 2012 15.2% of the sales of single-family homes in King County were bank-owned. In April 2013 that number was just 6.8%.
The low point of the last few years was 5.7% in November. I wouldn’t be surprised to see us drop below that level in the next few months.
Short sales inched up a bit in the month, rising from 9.2% in March to 9.9% in April. A year ago 11.6% of sales in the county were short sales.
Later this week we’ll take a look at how the median prices are moving for bank-owned homes, short sales, and non-distressed sales.
Rate this post:
+30Rising Homeownership May Lead to Rising Unemployment
There was an interesting article in the New York Times last week that caught my attention: Homeownership May Actually Cause Unemployment
Homeownership is a good thing, for the individual and for society. Or so American governments, whether Republican or Democrat, have long believed. The benefits have been cited repeatedly in justifying the existence and expansion of the tax breaks given to home buyers.
But maybe it isn’t nearly as good as had been thought.
A new study by two economists concludes that rising levels of homeownership in a state “are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state.” As more homes are owned, in other words, fewer people have jobs.
This week’s poll is inspired by the story, but since I only linked to it in the comments and I’m interested in seeing more broad discussion on the topic, I’m dedicating a regular post to the topic. Commenter “whatsmyname” weighed in, accusing the study authors of having ulterior motives:
English translation:
Cutting taxes for the rich without decreasing tax revenues will require increasing tax revenues from the not rich. We think they’re too stupid to notice when we say it openly. Oftentimes, we are right.
Here’s the problem with that claim, though. It has been well-documented by numerous sources that most of the benefit from the mortgage interest deduction is in fact collected by “the rich.” The “not rich” have been duped into thinking it’s a great deal for them when in reality they get very little from it. Here are a few links on that topic:
- Despite Benefit Disparities, Middle Class Supports Mortgage Deduction
- Only Rich People Benefit From The Home Interest Mortgage Deduction
- The Stark Geographic Inequality of the Home Mortgage Interest Deduction
- Who Really Benefits From Interest Deductions
So what do you think about the claim that increasing homeownership in a region leads to a later increase in unemployment? I think the authors make a compelling case, although I admit that I have not yet read the entire original study. I’m a fan of homeownership, but I also understand that it’s not right for everyone, and it is ill-suited to the increasingly mobile workforce of today’s economy.
[Update: Here's the link to the original paper from the Peterson Institute for International Economics: Does High Home-Ownership Impair the Labor Market?]
Rate this post:
+30
