November numbers were released today by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. You can check out the raw numbers here in PDF format, or you’ve got your pick of four local papers and their commentary on what the numbers “mean”:
Much like the movie “Groundhog Day,” the latest news on local home sales may sound like a rerun of the previous months — no slowdown in the market despite fierce competition, rising prices and higher interest rates.
But the number of properties that buyers can choose from is down substantially from last year. These are not the conditions that foretell the bursting of a real-estate bubble.
Executive summary: Prices still 15% higher than a year ago, but stagnating since about August of this year, with combined sales of $349,950 in August, and $350,000 in November. I probably have just as much qualification to offer analysis of these numbers as any of the newspaper reporters writing these articles, which is to say “none at all.” I guess we’ll just see what happens.
(Elizabeth Rhodes, Seattle Times, 12.06.2005)
(Kristen Millares Bolt, Seattle P-I, 12.06.2005)
(Clayton Park, King County Journal, 12.06.2005)
(Barbara Clements, Tacoma News-Tribune, 12.05.2005)
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I’d like to welcome all of the Californians to Washington State!
This is all your fault. For the moment you think that the real estate here is cheap. Soon we will all realize that this is the worst time in all of history to buy a house.
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We just rented a house in 4 bedroom, 2 ba, 2600 sq. ft house in Redmond for 1350.00 a month from a guy who quit his job at Microsoft to flip real estate properties. He even took us to dinner.
It IS all about California. The Wall Street Journal was right. Washington, Oregon and Arizona are going to reap the benefits of the California crash – for the time being.
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This seems to be good news. i bought a house back in April. Got it for 431K. Was worried we might have bought at the top…now it’s obvious we got a bargain. We could turn the house around for at least 50K-75K more and it’s only been 6 months!
At least when things cool down we’ll have some headroom before the prices drop back to what we paid. But what if they drop even lower? Hard to say…
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Honestly, I’d say your appreciation is over with.
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[...] piece from June 2006, about a year before Seattle’s peak pricing (but eight months after sales began declining year-over-year). By this time most of the rest of the country had figured out the boom [...]
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