Seattle Bubble

• NWMLS: Seattle off 1.5% YoY, King County off 1.1%
• Sell It In The Slow Season
• Zillow-rific… Or Something
• Advertising the Bubble
• Welcome to Seattle Bubble

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17 responses so far ↓

• 1 Lake Hills Renter // Dec 25, 2006 at 7:36 pm

  Merry Christmas everyone.

• 2 Tim,Vic and Mr.B // Dec 26, 2006 at 10:38 am

  I see that over the last 3 months, (10/23-12/25) both here and in San Diego, the median price has dropped by $10,000.00 in each market the 25th and 75th percentile has also dropped substanitally here. and that is with the winter holiday drop. looks like a mirror to me. I truly beleive the corolation is there. Shug..any comments? I would like to hear your take on this despite everybody saying you are don’t know what you are talking about.

• 3 meshugy // Dec 26, 2006 at 10:58 am

  Hi Tim…I don’t think the market in San Diego has all that much to do with what’s going on here. The main dialectic between San Diego and Seattle is the Cal ex-pat phenomenon. So a slower market in San Diego may have the effect of reducing demand here. But hard to say the degree to which that will happen.

  Also, it sounds like you’re using the Housingtrackers #s. While those are interesting, keep in mind they only record asking prices. The Median Selling price in Seattle has been pretty steady…while I believe that San Diego’s has been dropping. (Anyone have sold data for SD?)

• 4 Peckhammer // Dec 26, 2006 at 11:14 am

  MSN real Estate thinks Seattle is special:

  How bad will the 2007 housing market be?

  “As with prices and sales, trends in new home construction can vary dramatically from market to market. Housing starts in the Detroit area will be among the lowest in the country in 2007, plummeting 18.3% due to continuing economic woes. Interestingly, prices will not decline, but this is largely because they cannot go any lower (Read more about Detroit’s market in “The foreclosure capital of the U.S.”). Seattle is the only area that will see a rise (4.7%) in housing starts, primarily because of a strong job market with companies like Microsoft and Boeing based in the area.”

• 5 Tim,Vic and Mr.B // Dec 26, 2006 at 11:44 am

  Hi Shug,
  San Diego is selling at about 95% of asking over the last year. I don’t think Seattle is that much higher. Do you have data to show differently? I hope you aren’t going to give statisitcs that people are paying more than asking, which might happen on occassion, but certainly isn’t the norm. Especially after seeing numerous for sale signs that say “price reduced”
  A $10,000.00 drop over 3 months is still a drop. especially with inventory dropping off for the holidays.

• 6 octopuswithafez // Dec 26, 2006 at 11:51 am

  PI Article

  Real estate agents take dramatic turn for sales
  Crowded field leads to costumes, gags, gifts and elaborate Web sites

  By AUBREY COHEN
  P-I REPORTER

  Puck is upfront about his job.

  “Let’s face it, I’m a marketing ploy,” the 5-year-old English bulldog writes on his page of Realtor Phoenix Rudner’s Web site, seattlehousehound.com.

  It’s a way to stand out from a thickening crowd of agents, said Rudner, of Coldwell Banker Bain’s Capitol Hill office.

  “You want to define yourself,” he said. “If you really know an area really well, why not focus on that?”

  The Seattle-King County Association of Realtors has about 8,800 active members — up more than 80 percent from 1999. The state Department of Licensing reports there are 13,747 licensed real estate salespeople in King County.

  …

• 7 octopuswithafez // Dec 26, 2006 at 11:54 am

  Anyone have a favorite house to track?

  Mine is MLS# 26196372

  new construction in my neighborhood that has been sitting on the market for 3 months now…

• 8 meshugy // Dec 26, 2006 at 12:01 pm

  Hi Tim…just look at the MLS records. SFH Median in King county has pretty much held steady at $435K since July. (Peaked at $440 in Oct and had a low of $325 in Sept.)

  No sign of declining sold prices…completely normal activity for this time of year. Usually prices flat line or edge slightly down for a few months and then explode come Spring.

• 9 Tim,Vic and Mr.B // Dec 26, 2006 at 1:15 pm

  the problem Shug, is that if asking price is going down, then selling price is going down as well.

  Sold Median does not give as clear of a forcast as asking median because of the houses that are still left on the market.
  If the median selling price is $440,000, then those homes selling are above the median asking of 384,950.00 (dropped from 394,950.00)and fall into the 75th percentile of highest asking homes, which has dropped over $15,000 in asking price already. I don’t see strength there.

  Fill me in if my logic is skewed, but that is the way I see it. Certainly, at this time, people are not getting more than what they are asking. The bidding wars are gone, as that I am sure you will agree with.

• 10 meshugy // Dec 26, 2006 at 1:28 pm

  the problem Shug, is that if asking price is going down, then selling price is going down as well.

  That’s an assumption that can’t really be proven without more data.

  I see it. Certainly, at this time, people are not getting more than what they are asking.

  Actually, houses are overbid routinely in my area -Ballard/Loyal Heights. sometimes as much as 70K or more over asking. Especially the nicer ones…there’s always multiple buyers fighting over them.

• 11 MisterBubble // Dec 26, 2006 at 1:53 pm

  “the problem Shug, is that if asking price is going down, then selling price is going down as well.”

  Asking price and selling price certainly do correlate, but the correlation isn’t perfect. So while you should ignore Meshugy’s dissembling about needing “more data,” there’s also a danger in assuming that asking price is a “good” predictor of anything, except seller ambition (and/or delusion).

  “Sold Median does not give as clear of a forcast as asking median because of the houses that are still left on the market.”

  Maybe. But I think your logic is still a bit tortured, because you’re using median asking prices from housing tracker today, and comparing them to median selling prices from the MLS in October.

  If you really want to do this correctly, you need to compare asking price data and sales price data from the same time, on the same plot. A boxplot is the perfect tool for this. For example, imagine a plot containing two boxes per month — one containing sales data, the other containing asking data. You would have a very accurate picture of sales trends for the whole market, in one image.

  Unfortunately, you can’t get the data that you need to make such a plot. The MLS would rather keep you in the dark, so that they can continue to mislead people with abuses of summary statistics….

• 12 Tim,Vic and Mr.B // Dec 26, 2006 at 2:29 pm

  Mr. Bubble, Yeah I understand that part of it. I used to be able to find the asking/selling price nfo on the same homes in San Diego, but here, I can’t locate that, as you pointed out.

  My point is that the asking prices have dropped 10-15 thousand in the last three months. I don’t think it is due to lesser value homes coming on the market but that sellers are becoming more realistic/fearful/woken-up. So that’s my observation.

• 13 Eleua // Dec 26, 2006 at 2:56 pm

  It would seem to me that as asking price goes up, the greater percent of asking the final sales price will be (seller’s market).

  It would follow that as asking price goes down, the greater the disparity between asking and sales price.

  During the go-go days, people would bid over asking During times of buyer’s strength, low-ball offers will come in.

  So, if this is correct, as asking price goes down, sales price will go down even faster.

• 14 Tim,Vic and Mr.B // Dec 26, 2006 at 3:22 pm

  I do have a question. How does one find out the coresponding numbers on the MLS sheet, ie area 300, 310 etc….and what neighborhood that is?
  thanks for your help.

• 15 dan // Dec 26, 2006 at 4:01 pm

  I think we could use the S&P Case-Shiller index to understand what’s really happening with prices. Conveniently, they just added Seattle to their data set, and then made the past several years of data available.

  You can read Toscano’s view of this index here.

  http://piggington.com/the_case_shiller_index

  The indices themselves are published monthly here:

  http://tinyurl.com/tbjfq

  Since there’s real money riding on both sides of this, there’s incentive for this to be accurate.

  Here’s the month-over-month change for the past year (through October) for Seattle:

  1.04%
  0.90%
  0.79%
  0.97%
  1.42%
  1.66%
  1.49%
  1.70%
  1.21%
  1.04%
  0.68%
  0.39%

• 16 Grivetti // Dec 26, 2006 at 11:37 pm

  Renters gloat over housing slump

  I can see the billboards in the distance
  Writing is on every wall
  I don’t wanna know about your business
  Sooner or later, friend, you’ve got to fall

  -Husker Du

• 17 The Tim // Dec 31, 2006 at 2:07 pm

  Tim,

  I see that no one addressed your question regarding the MLS area numbers. Here’s a map that I grabbed from the Seattle Times website.

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