The latest edition of Sound Housing Quarterly—the subscription-based sister product to Seattle Bubble—has been published. As the name implies, Sound Housing Quarterly is journal of the Puget Sound residential real estate market, published four times a year.
Benefits of Sound Housing Quarterly:
- Broad geographic coverage (7 Puget Sound counties).
- Provides a concise picture of overall market conditions.
- Cleaner, more printable charts.
- All the recent data compiled in a single package.
If that sounds like something you or someone you know would benefit from, head over to the website at HousingQuarterly.com to download a free preview of the current issue and to learn more about what Sound Housing Quarterly is and how to subscribe or purchase a single issue.
Here’s a brief preview of the type of charts that are included in Sound Housing Quarterly:
If you are involved in the Puget Sound housing market in any way, as a home buyer, a home seller, a real estate agent, or a real estate investor—Sound Housing Quarterly is written with you in mind.
This 40-page publication provides an overview of a variety of factors affecting the Puget Sound housing market, as well as a detailed look at county-by-county conditions, and a forecast for where the market is headed in the coming months.
I enjoy providing Seattle Bubble free of charge as a service to the community, but I recognize that the format here can sometimes be intimidating, making it difficult to get a good handle on the overall market picture without reading along every day. That’s why I created Sound Housing Quarterly. Please take a few minutes to check it out, and consider subscribing. Thanks!
I have a question about the statistical analysis of the housing market, in particular when Doctor Schiller wants to set up a Real Estate Futures Market.
According to statistics the housing bubble made sense. The statistics showed prices going up. Comparative Market Analysis showed prices going up.
In today’s market we show a slow decline in pricing when we all know that the bottom has fallen out of housing. The slow decline is also do to the Comparative Market Analysis method.
Banks are refusing to sell short below a certain percentage which is 80% of loan value, but they are also doing Brokers Price Opinions to determine a percentage of fair market value. In that way they are kind of in control of the statistical data.
My ultimate question would be: Aren’t the loans being created today going to be higher than the value of the assets two years from now? Won’t that leave us exactly where we are today, maybe worse?
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Tim – A couple of marketing ideas you have probably already thought of, but I’ll mention them just in case you haven’t.
- Send out a broadcast email to all the real estate agents in the 7 counties announcing Sound Housing Quarterly and maybe offering discounted initial subscriptions to get things moving.
- Offer the agents a package where if they subscribe for a year, they can give say 5 or 10 or maybe more one quarter gift subscriptions to their clients for free and additional one quarter subscriptions to their clientsduring that year for a discounted fee. Maybe $2 or $5 per additional gift subscription. Or if they subscribe for a single quarter for $25, they can give each client a one quarter gift subscription for say S2 or $5 or $10. The lower the price for the gift subscriptions, the more agents will use it as their own promotion which brings you agents as subscribers and gets Sound Housing Quarterly out in front of a larger portion of the public.
Agents love to be able to give stuff to clients and this would give them an insentive to subscribe and use Sound Housing Quarterly as a free gift to market themselves to clients. This would give you a distribution network of agents working for you (or with you) to get Sound Housing Quarterly in front of the general public. Obviously, the cheaper the gift subscriptions the more likely agents are to do it.
If you feel it’s really necessary, you could even provide a refrigerator magnet with each gift subscription. Sorry, I couldn’t resist saying that.
As you may have gathered from other posts I’ve made, I tend to believe that agent marketing should provide real estate related information like Sound Housing Quarterly rather than cookie receipes. I applaud brokers and agents like the Perry’s, Ray, Kary, Ira and others when they attempt to do this. I think it’s good for the brokerage profession and may also be good for Sound Housing Quarterly.
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I think you should be more explicit that the preview is only a few pages from the full report. It wasn’t until I checked the page numbers that I realized it was not the full thing.
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IS THE TITLE AN OXYMORON?
Or is it only referencing Puget Sound? LOL
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RE: David Losh @ 1 –
Dave, I agree with your conclusion, subject to the following caveat: If the Treasury and Fed can slow the recognition of bank losses and prop up bank capital long enough to allow banks to generate enough operating profits to offset the loan losses, the banks can survive some continued deflation and decrease in real estate prices. The current game plan by the Fed and Treasury appears to be to keep the yeild curve reasonably steep with short rates near zero. Theoretically, banks should be able to make good operating profits in that interest environment,
My personal thesis (and probably that of at least some others more knowlegeable than me) is that extended periods of deflation is the dooms day machine for the fractional reserve banking system and perhaps for a capitalist economic system as well. Deflation destroys the value of collateral for bank loans. As the value of collateral decreases, loans become under secured and the risk of loss to the bank increases. If the loan is under collateralized and the borrower defaults the bank takes a loss which impacts the bank’s capital reserves. If deflation goes on long enough, a substantial portion of the capital of the financial system is destroyed and the financial system collapses.
In addition to destroying the value of collateral and consequently the financial system, deflation probably means that holding cash is (or might be depending upon returns) a better investment than holding income producing assets like real estate, plants and equipment or securities. If holding cash is a better investment than holding hard assets, there is a decrease in capital formation for business. If there is no capital formation, there probably can’t be any significant economic growth. And if there isn’t enough capital formation and investment in hard assets to replace depreciating assets like plant and equipment, there will most likely be continuing economic contraction.
As bad as inflation sounds, I don’t think that the fractional reserve banking system and capitalism can live without it. As important as keeping inlfation low may be, in the long run deflation must be stopped or the financial system and economy die.
By way of full disclosure, the above is just my common sense BS. I’m not well read enough to know which, if any, authorities might agree or disagree. But then again common sense financial analysis said 20 billion plus for 6 WPPSS plants was a bad investment long before Wall Street figured it out. And it took a patent clerk to tell the worlds physicists that the Newtonian model was an approximation with reasonable accuracy only within modest limits. Just because I’m not a recognized authority doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong. But to my mother’s disappointment, I ain’t no Einstein either.
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By One Eyed Man @ 2:
From: Julie Emerson
Subject: D0n’t let underp3rMance hurt ur s41es!!!!
Give ur sales a b00st with a dos3 of S0und hous1ng 1/4erly from e-housingpub-site.net!!!1! Nev4r l3ave ur clients uNsatis13d 4gain!! Nu subsc|2iburz get 30% 0ff!!! Thatz almost 50% off!
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RE: One Eyed Man @ 2 – Good ideas. Thanks.
RE: Joel @ 6 – I find it somewhat disturbing that my comment spam filter allowed that to go through :^)
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By Joel @ 6:
I think you may have a future in this!
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One-eyed – I’ve been lending money for nigh on 50 years, first as a hard-money lender to my brothers, with brutal interest rates I might add, then as a regulated lender, and now, again, as a hard lender…and your succint analysis of the banking funk we are currently witnessing, was spot on.
It’s now a race between charge-offs and obscenely high net interest margins. The folks who want the banks to lose, are those who want to see a depression so they can buy the assets for 5¢ on the dollar. I’m hedged on both sides of this race.
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RE: The Dude Abides @ 9 – RE: One Eyed Man @ 5 –
Statistics may work great for figuring probabilities, but today’s Real Estate market is more driven by employment figures than historical data.
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