what is the market driven by in boston or silicon valley? how about spain and ireland? I will give you a hint: credit. it has nothing to do with jobs at all.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/141867.asp?source=rss

The numbers are a couple of years old, but Seattle may well still be in the lead. Drivers license numbers show that the total migration in is much larger than just the tech jobs.

I think the areas that saw more rapid increases in prices were fed by people trying to beat retiring boomers to their retirement locations. Those areas priced themselves out of the retirement business, and it collapsed. Seattle probably had some equity locusts bring their gains up here and drove prices up. But the market here is driven by jobs, which has slowed some but is still going on.

They can’t afford homes at today’s prices either, especially with their other major life costs to deal with, like tuition loans and cars and poor financial management.

As soon as I hear someone mention the north american union garbage their credibility with me is totally shot I would rather listen to an amway sales pitch or a timeshare offer than that nonsense. What an impossibly complicated conspiracy theory that is. It makes all other conspiracy theories look plausible.

Get out your tin foil hat!!

Now that’s proper data analysis.

Lou Dobbs CNN has already documented that Bill Gates’ type H-1Bs brought in are mainly lower skilled workers replacing local resident Seattle jobs that would have been at higher wages.

This is key. We hear constant complaint from high tech employers that they cannot find any qualified employees and that not enough college graduates are studying the sciences.

Most of this is make believe, and is the employers way of demanding lower paid labor from Asia. Also manufactured is the belief that America is lagging behind in technical workforce. We count technical workers differently than other countries. China and India, with populations 4 times that of USAs, include many trade jobs, like mechanics, when they calculate how many people are graduating with technical degrees.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/Microsoft-Salaries-E1651.htm

AS

People at vendors are not employees of microsoft, but they still have software jobs, at rates similar to those at MSFT without the long hours or need to compute to redmond.

Bubbleheads always want to downplay the effect, but for every MSFT employee there are also employees at vendors too.

Man, that’s funny. Don’t let anyone in HR hear you say that vendors are employees.

Besides, I might buy your point if MSFT was hiring only college grads from out of state. That would mean that there was a large net influx of new high income wage earners in the area. However, I think that there are probably just as many local people moving laterally from an existing job in the area. So the net gain to the area (and local RE prices) is marginal. Certainly not enough to justify a >$400k median in the area.

Last time I looked at a MSFT employment website there was like one bubble head type hired for 20 or so service sector administration jobs [low paid]. Lou Dobbs CNN has already documented that Bill Gates’ type H-1Bs brought in are mainly lower skilled workers replacing local resident Seattle jobs that would have been at higher wages. Besides, why do we go to a college dropout like Bill Gates for American direction on college placements of techies? LOL

Another thing, the 757/767 was developed in 1978 at Boeing with about 70% technicals [folks with a year or two of college] and engineers working with them; the 757/767 airframe was a rousing success too. Back then we hired local Americans and trained them the skills. Easily too, but we paid them real American wages too….why can’t MSFT hire our Seattle area kids and train them into higher paid jobs the same way? I know, he’s too cheap and with the way VISTA went lately, it looks like his way is the wrong way too.

http://seattlebubble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1430

Things can change amazingly fast for the other tech companies as well when the economy turns south.

Plus, how did the housing market do anyway in the past 12 months, Garth? The market has been going straight down, even solid MSFT hiring couldn’t stop it. Prices are too high. Period.

Quote from internal release:
Microsoft’s employment figures are watched closely by regional economists, as a barometer of the local technology employment market. In the Seattle region, the company added a net total of 3,346 employees in the past 11 months, bringing the total to 38,856 at the end of May.

Without the local aQuantive workers, Microsoft would have added a net total of about 2,700 employees in the Seattle region — more than it grew locally last year, but not as much as in 2006. The record year for Microsoft’s employment growth in the Seattle region remains 2000 — at the height of the technology boom — when the company added nearly 4,500 employees locally.

Microsoft employees don’t make enough to afford the average house around Redmond/Bellevue (medians around $600-650k). Maybe a dual-MS salary level household, or a director level manager. I am one of those highly paid software developers, so I should know. Unless you got into the RE game well before the bubble, or stumbled on a pot of gold, you won’t be buying "chocolate" for a while until prices drop and wages rise.

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/141616.asp

It also talks about them trying to find enough downtown Seattle offices space for 1750 employees.

Bubbleheads always want to downplay the effect, but for every MSFT employee there are also employees at vendors too. College kids seem to hate computer science even more than ever, so many new hires will continue to be new residents to the area.

No they didn’t, they fell 15.3% in the year ending April 30.

And this from Bloomberg, for crying out loud.

just a quick question: how does the April/March CS price increase compare to the last ten years? Even Miami saw a decrease in negative month to month decreases for April/March vs Feb/Jan.

Also, is median price factored into the CS index? There are less properties selling, but the high end always drag in cyclical downturns.

just some thoughts..

http://i251.photobucket.com/albums/gg317/bubbleblog/CSI_deflationFromFeb07-1.jpg

How many times have you had to endure the tools in the RE industry try to tell you that real estate is a ‘forced savings’ plan. Well, look no further than Ms. Butterfield if you want to see how a (non-diversified) ‘forced savings plan’ works out. Poof!

B&W Nikes – I’m just sick enough to like your avatar / gravatar. What the hell is it?

maybe next month…or the next, it shouldnt really matter makes for a fun site.

Looking at month to month changes in CSI is confusing because it is a 3 month rolling average. Since today’s result is really (feb+mar+apr)/3 and last month was (jan+feb+mar)/3, the so-called mar-apr difference is really (apr-jan)/3.

It does seem like things have gotten worse on housingtracker.net the past few weeks, so future CSI will probably continue at full speed down for a while.

this isn’t even a dead cat bounce. it is a non-seasonally adjusted data point.

S&P/Case-Shiller Home Prices Fell 15.3% in April

If you look at the Case-Shiller history, predictable, abrupt seasonal price direction changes happen in these markets:

- Denver
- Atlanta
- Boston
- Cleveland
- Dallas

Seattle/Portland do not have this abrupt pattern, they have more of a spring “acceleration” from gradual price increase. This could mean Seattle will lag the price declines in the rest of the country in May and June as well.

Ray Pepper
http://www.500Realty.net

Yes, real estate has bottomed-out in Seattle and the long awaited bounce back is coming on board as predicted. It isn’t just an anomaly in the data, has Tim suggests. Its real as steel.

Who cares if unsold inventory was removed from the listings in bulk, who cares if no one can afford them and banks have tightened credit. The FHA will offer 0 down loans again to marginal buyers and the honest tax paying investors will bail the FHA loans out if they go belly-up, its only fair the ones that are fiscally minded bale out the spend thrifts.

Literally bought her own hype. That’s really too bad. You know, as much as I’m rooting for this to unwind, it will probably get so bad that I’m gonna actually feel sorry for a lot of these people…