Time for September market statistics from the NWMLS.
The NWMLS press release will be posted at this link when it goes up.
Here is your summary along with the usual graphs and other updates.
Here’s your King County SFH summary:
September 2008
Active Listings: up 5% YOY
Pending Sales: up 15% YOY
Median Closed Price*: $415,000 – down 7.8% YOY
Here is the updated Seattle Bubble Spreadsheet, and here’s a copy in Excel 2003 format. Click below for the graphs and the rest of the post.
Here’s the graph of inventory with each year overlaid on the same chart.
No big surprise here. Inventory has been pretty level since May, and continued the pattern in September, but still came in slightly above last year’s peak (which was a record high at the time).
Pending sales are the real shock this month. Every other year on record, sales have dropped off significantly from August to September, but this year they actually slightly increased.
What’s going on here? Have a significant number of buyers decided that the bottom must be in, and now is the time to buy? Are people trying to jump in for some “security” before the economy fully melts down? Is the NWMLS monkeying with the numbers? (I doubt that one, but it is possible.)
The odd movement in the pending sales statistic threw quite a wrench in the supply / demand graphs. Here’s the supply/demand YOY graph.
In a single month, the pending sales YOY statistic shot from -16% to +15%. Wild. That’s the biggest 1-month change in this particular statistic in the history of the data I have available (back to 2000).
Here’s the chart of supply and demand raw numbers:
The sales bump even looks weird on this one. Where every single other year has seen the decline into the winter sales season begin in September, 2008 sticks out like a sore thumb.
Perhaps we have finally found the floor for King County SFH sales? No matter how bad things get, there will always be 1,700 or so people trying to buy a home? I think it’s still too early to be calling any kind of bottom based on a single month statistic. We’ll see in the coming months whether this was a strange anomoly or the start of a recovery in sales.
Of course, the slight uptick in sales did not keep the median price from dropping about $9,000 in a month. Even so, the YOY change did bump up slightly from last month, since last year the median fell over $27,000 from August to September.
Here’s the bonus graph from last month, comparing King County SFH prices each month for every year back to 1994.
It looks like it is quite possibly on track to fall below 2005 prices by the end of the year.
Here are the news blurbs from the Times and P-I. Check back tomorrow for the full reporting roundup.
Seattle Times: Median house, condo prices down in September
Seattle P-I: Local housing market stabilizes
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EconE,
I agree with you.
I myself looked at a condo for my folks retirement, and was quite frankly amused at 1200 Sq Ft for $650k + $.50 per Sq Ft of HOA. Which came out to be a joke. Granted that condo sold no units period.
I however do not agree that buying anything right now is a bad thing. It all depends on what a person is buying. If they are buying a home 20% off the current market, and understand that the reality is it can go down 10-20% more, then they are making an educated decision.
If it is someone helocing their house to 100% of value and barely makng payments, that is a risky and reckless behavior.
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[...] Locally, the NWMLS reports Pending Sales up 4.1% from Year Ago, Total Inventory Unchanged, while Seattle Bubble recaps King County SFH pendings to be up 15% from same time last [...]
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Tim:
Good graphs!
The tone is factual and cool…why do people think you are a rock throwing maniac?
You seem a bit more visionary these days…
Do all of your stats use the median SFR price, rather than the median home price (which would include condos), and why?
I ask, because many of the historical stats I have researched use median home price.
Hopefully you’ve already answered this a few times, and can give me a canned response.
Thanks!
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Roger,
Yes, the primary charts I post are based on King County SFH median. As to why I do not include condos, I point you to this post: Seattle Bubble Stats: Where are the Condos?
Also note that King County condo data is available in the spreadsheets I link to each month, I just don’t post graphs on them.
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[...] It’s far worse for the real estate market, as shown by plummeting prices and rising inventories in Seattle. [...]
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Hey Tim,
I’m using your graph in the classroom tomorrow with a big “from SeattleBubble.com” at the bottom.
Thank you for the graph!
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My pleasure. Thank you!
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[...] interesting snippet that’s outside of the usual data I include in this monthly post. Despite last month’s significant bump in pending sales (up 15% YOY), closed sales this month failed to experience a [...]
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[...] pending sales stats increasingly more useless as a measure of market health. So pending sales were up 15% year-over-year in September. Does that really mean much if 20% of those sales never actually close (vs. just 7% the year [...]
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