Seattle Bubble

• Poll: Is it ethical for a home debtor to “walk away” from a mortgage?
• Poll: Do you personally know someone that has bought Seattle-area real estate as an “investment”?
• Poll: I like the Seattle area because of the:
• Poll: You win the lottery tomorrow. What’s the earliest you buy a house in the Seattle area?
• Poll: Which has the most bias in real estate reporting?

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15 responses so far ↓

• 1 Adam // Apr 7, 2008 at 9:42 am

  A lot of news sites are claiming that the housing bubble is either on it’s last legs or already over (like msn.com here). What do you think about that?

• 2 alex // Apr 7, 2008 at 9:50 am

  I am dying to see The Tim’s response to this article:

  [Home sales Drop, Prices Don't]
  http://archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com/cgi-bin/texis.cgi/web/vortex/display?slug=homesales05&date=20080405&query=prices+don%27t

• 3 rose-colored-coolaid // Apr 7, 2008 at 9:53 am

  Adam,

  Fleckenstein never called a bottom. Rather he was picking out those who did to point out the foolishness of it.

• 4 The Tim // Apr 7, 2008 at 9:54 am

  I’m working on the March “Reporting Roundup” as we speak, er… type. I would have had it up on Saturday, but I was out of town visiting my parents (who are selling their home and buying another house… but I’ll save that story for a later post, it’s quite interesting actually).

• 5 Ben // Apr 7, 2008 at 10:31 am

  I just have to say that I saw Ira’s “Would you buy a used house from this man?” ad on the site today, and I LMAO.

  Oh - and looking at all of the graphs and statistics and news about the stock market, I would be super surprised if the bottom was this year.

• 6 Ray Pepper // Apr 7, 2008 at 10:57 am

  The picture of Ira looked like me after my NCAA bracket was crushed followed by the Bellagio Buffet dessert section.

• 7 AndyMiami // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:22 am

  Question on the INVENTORY numbers.

  The King County SFH reached 12,000 this weekend, and now it’s back to 11,000. Can someone explain this. Surely there are not all sales. Are Realtors de-listing to get the number lower. I have a feeling a lot games take place.

  Thanks,

• 8 topdog // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:30 am

  AndyMiami: Every morning around 4am or so the system removes the listings that need to be removed for that day (usually a hundred or so) and this number tends to be particularly large on Monday mornings (perhaps to clear out houses that sold over the weekend?). Every once in a while, the system appears to “forget” to do its daily clearing of listings, so the inventory number gets higher than it should be. It looked like the system “forgot” to clear at least one day this weekend, and today is Monday, so we had a particularly large drop in the “Inventory” number.

• 9 S-Crow // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:33 am

  Last I heard (1st days of April) it was around 13,500 +,- for King Co active listings (Res. + Condo).

• 10 deejayoh // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:40 am

  RE: Alex in #2 -

  That article seems to me to pretty myopic in it’s view of housing prices. Look at the graph of home price trends in the last year for KingCounty/Seattle/MSA from any source. You’ll see it was about where we are now 12 months ago, then went up ~10% between Feb and July.

  Let’s be generous and just assume flat housing prices between now and July. Maybe even up 1 or 2%. What happens? The year over year comps still look atrocious. The market will suddenly be off 8 or 10%. More likely - 12-15% off peak. All of the sudden the writers will be apoplectic. It’s inevitable.

  The stage is already set. The train has left the station. The writing is on the wall. Choose your metaphor. Unless this market picks up some major momentum, the comps are just going to get uglier and uglier for the next 4 months.

• 11 AndySeattle // Apr 7, 2008 at 12:29 pm

  Who in the heck voted Yes in this poll? I demand that you show yourselves!

• 12 AndyMiami // Apr 7, 2008 at 12:53 pm

  topdog // Apr 7, 2008 at 11:30 am

  AndyMiami: Every morning around 4am or so the system removes the listings that need to be removed for that day (usually a hundred or so) and this number tends to be particularly large on Monday mornings (perhaps to clear out houses that sold over the weekend?). Every once in a while, the system appears to “forget” to do its daily clearing of listings, so the inventory number gets higher than it should be. It looked like the system “forgot” to clear at least one day this weekend, and today is Monday, so we had a particularly large drop in the “Inventory” number.

  Very Good…thanks

• 13 Scotsman // Apr 7, 2008 at 1:02 pm

  Ah, shucks, deejayoh- you just took all the fun out of the next 5 months! How can we gaze deeply into shallow ponds if this kind of logic is going to prevail?

  The reality you point out gives new meaning to the old phrase “the numbers are already baked in.”

  Would a corollary be: Sellers, it’s a great time to sell, because it’s a great time to buy? Ah, let’s keep it simple: “Real estate always goes up.” ;-)

• 14 Matthew // Apr 8, 2008 at 7:10 am

  MSM will just start reporting MOM data instead of YOY once the YOY turn nasty. Count on it.

• 15 Chaina // Apr 8, 2008 at 2:41 pm

  This ia great blog and thanks for posting these numbers. I see a lot of people are questioning whether March was really a good month compared to Feb and March 2007. One thing that will definitely help us decide that is if you also post the avg. $/SQFT values for all the homes sold. Agreed that this is not going to give you a complete picture but it will at least tell you if people are buying larger houses at the same price as compared to last month/last year.

  Don’t know if it’s too difficult to calculate this stat but I can see why this will be very helpful

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