Seattle Bubble

One of the topics discussed frequently on this blog is the notion that prices in the suburbs are likely to fall much further and faster than prices in the urban core of Seattle. Yesterday Zillow posted their quarterly market update data. I will say that while I’m ambivalent about Zillow’s “Z-estimate” feature, [...]

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The point has been made many times here that exposure to downturns needs to be viewed in the context of how much a market rose during the boom.  I thought it would be interesting to test this by comparing the total percentage gain during the boom years to the total percentage drop from peak to [...]

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I have a couple of RSS feeds from real estate sites that I use to monitor listings that might be of interest to me.  They are targeted at a couple of neighborhoods, and focused on homes that are likely to be mid-century modern.  Over the past couple of weeks, I had noted that the volume [...]

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There were a couple of stories in the Seattle Times over the weekend pertaining to the health of the local economy.  The first was an article on the commercial real estate market, highlighting a forecast for falling rents.
Commercial real-estate brokers James Keating and Sean Barnes have one word of advice for their clients looking to [...]

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Over the weekend, the Seattle Times published an article titled Bad real-estate loans stack up for smaller local banks, about the exposure local banks have to real estate loans. The gist of the article was that many local banks, squeezed out of the mortgage business by the likes of WaMu and Countrywide, had doubled down [...]

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Many of you are aware of the “Residential Property Index” published for the top 25 MSAs by Radarlogic. Radarlogic has a similar business model to MacroMarkets with the Case-Shiller Index (e.g., creating housing-based contracts to be traded on a futures market) but there are some key differences in the way that they calculate their index. [...]

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