With real estate’s “spring buying season” basically in the rear-view mirror, one would expect that the housing inventory shortage we’ve been seeing so far in 2012 might subside.
Unfortunately, that does not yet appear to be the case. Both in King County as a whole and Seattle specifically, weekly inventory data from Redfin shows a continued decline in selection.
Here’s how May 2012 looks compared to each of the previous twelve years, according to NWMLS data:
While inventory is at an all-time low, the picture isn’t quite as grim for buyers as it was at the peak of the bubble-buying frenzy in 2005, since there aren’t as many sales now as there were then. I attribute this to the dramatically different mindsets of the 2005 and the 2012 buyer.
2005: We have to buy a home right now! Something! Anything! Homes are an amazing investment, and every month we wait we’re that much closer to being priced out forever! Let’s forget the inspection, throw down an escalation clause, and pay whatever it takes!
2012: We would like to buy a home now, but we’re going to be sure we find the right home in the right neighborhood at the right price. Homes obviously aren’t a good investment, so we can and should be choosy about what we buy. If we find something really nice we’ll do what we can to get it, but we’re not in an incredible rush.
I suspect that the calmer mindset of today’s buyer will prevent any crazy run-ups in home prices in the near to mid-term future, despite today’s extreme lack of selection on the market.
Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 99 – right…. a number is just a number we’d need to see how its changing over time. Hopefully someone on this thread can quantify the past and extrapolate the future for us.. it’d be useful.
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By krs @ 100:
What? You don’t believe him? Sort of like when he tried to tell us a few weeks ago that he has a 35 minute commute to Seattle?
http://goo.gl/maps/rNCB
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RE: wreckingbull @ 102 – I thought everyone who posted in the comments section was a multimillionaire and I was the only one still changing the oil in my Yugo myself.
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By Peter @ 103:
You have only yourself to blame for that. You should have been following the investment advice posted here!
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RE: David Losh @ 1 –
Dave, this makes no sense at all. But please, keep trying.
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No need to fret. Altos Research says Seattle has more inventory now than it did last July.
And they have the word “Research” right there in their name.
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RE: 2kt @ 5 –
The multiple got to be as large as it because people make believe they need it.
Real Estate agents are kind of a lost art, but they also don’t need the multiple.
In a market that is going up in price sellers may not want to leave money on the table, but we are in a declining market price.
If you want to continue to play games with a leveraged purchase of a quarter, to half a million dollars, go ahead. The fact is that the buyer is in the driver’s seat now, they just need to make the best deal they can, and the multiple is doing nothing to help with that.
We didn’t always have a multiple, we didn’t always have online Brokerage, but the Real Estate market place still functioned.
It’s simple, if we were selling stocks nationally, or internationally an exchange, or multiple would be useful, but if Real Estate is local, where’s the advantage to the buyer?
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By David Losh @ 107:
Exposure. But for the NWMLS listings would not get the complete exposure they get on broker sites such as Redfin or JLS, and instead it would be more like Trulia or Zillow where you had to go to several sites to get all the listings.
That lack of exposure could be a benefit to the buyer though, just like how only having one picture on a listing can benefit a buyer. MLS systems exist because they are good for sellers, not because they are good for buyers.
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RE: Pegasus @ 75 –
Thank you corndog….you provided my new name.
I’ve been debating going back to the very first moniker I used on Keith’s blog many years ago…Keyser Soze, a favorite character of mine.
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RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 104 – Kary, I *did* listen to the investing advice from the commenters here. How do you think I ended up with the Yugo?
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RE: apartment boy @ 109 – you are worth billions but you can’t remember your id? on a blog you post to? and then someone else has to come up with an id for you? YOU must have cornered the market hmm was that what corn dog referred to?
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RE: interested @ 111 –
Worse yet, I stole ‘Dirty Renter’ from Ben’s blog.
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[...] market can choose to take their homes off the market. (We have seen this a bunch in markets like Seattle and Denver in [...]
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