Seattle Bubble

Photo by The Tim

The official layoff count for WaMu was made public today. According to various news sources, JPMorgan Chase will be cutting 3,400 jobs in Seattle.

JPMorgan Chase is laying off 3,400 Washington Mutual employees in Seattle, according to spokesman Tom Kelly. That’s more than 80 percent of the 4,300 people it employs in the city.

Most branch workers will keep their jobs, however.

WaMu’s former headquarters city is taking the brunt of the 9,200 WaMu layoffs that JPMorgan is making nationwide.

This is even more than the estimates we heard just a few weeks ago, when anonymous WaMu executives were cited in a Times report that said “as many as 3,000 of WaMu’s 4,200 workers in Seattle could lose their jobs.”

Fortunately it sounds like those that are losing their jobs are at least being given pretty nice severance packages, and many will have lots of time to find new jobs. It still hurts to lose a job though, and I sincerely hope that those affected by the massive bank failure are able to keep on their feet through these difficult economic times.

(Melissa Allison, Seattle Times, 12.01.2008)

While we wait for November sales statistics from the NWMLS, let’s take a look at a couple more charts of sales from the last few months to round out the big picture of what’s going on with local home sales.

First up, here’s a look at the total closed sales by quarter, for every quarter since 2000:

The third quarter this year looked very much like the first and second quarters, with the volume of closed sales coming in far below every other year on record. With just 4,510 total SFH sales closed in King County, Q3 actually came in lower than even the worst Q4 on record, which was 2007 at 4,524.

Next up, here’s an update to our listing breakdown graph, introduced and explained by Deejayoh in February this year. For historic charts of this data going back to 2001, check the ‘delisting’ tag.

The number of delisted homes (red) in October was somewhat high at 2,087, but not unprecedented for the first full month of fall. 2000-2002 saw similar numbers of delisted homes in October as well. In October last year, as we headed into the slow season, the market had 7,493 “stale” listings. This October there were 8,196 “stale” listings, a 9.4% increase.

Another thing that is somewhat interesting is that the number of homes delisted in October exceeded the number of homes sold by 760. That never happened from January 2003 through September 2007, when monthly sales exceeded delistings by an average of 1,786. Since October last year, delistings and sales have been relatively even.

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I’d like to draw your attention to a post I made earlier this week on the Redfin Sweet Digs blog: Where are buyers getting the biggest discounts?

The specific portion that I believe may be of interest to Seattle Bubble readers is the following chart, which is a scatterplot of Seattle-area zip codes, with the average list price of homes sold in each zip code in the last 3 months on the x-axis and the average percent discount from the final list price that they closed at on the y-axis.

I thought it was quite interesting to see a relatively strong correlation between the average price of a neighborhood and the percent below asking price that homes are closing at.

For anyone that is out there right now making offers (not that I think it’s a great time to buy yet), be aware that the more inexpensive the neighborhood, the less likely a seller is to accept an offer significantly below asking price.

If you’re interested you may download the full data summary here.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you are enjoying it with family and/or friends. We’ve all got a lot to be thankful for.

No post today. Consider this an open thread for any of you that are hanging around here today.

Photo taken August 10, 2006

Let’s check out the three price tiers for the Seattle area, as measured by Case-Shiller. Remember, Case-Shiller’s “Seattle” data is based on single-family home repeat sales in King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.

First up is the straight graph of the index from January 2000 through September 2008.

Price drops accelerated slightly in September for all three tiers. The low tier and middle tiers are rewound to just below April 2006 values, while the high tier is just above its May 2006 level. The middle tier again took the biggest percentage hit in September, falling 1.8% in a single month.

Here’s a chart of the year-over-year change in the index from August 2002 through September 2008.

The low tier had the biggest year-over-year hit, but not by a large margin. Both the low and the middle tiers fell over 10% YOY in September. Here’s where the tiers sit YOY as of September - Low: -10.5%, Med: -10.2%, Hi: -9.2%.

Lastly, here’s a decline-from-peak graph like the one posted yesterday, but looking only at the Seattle tiers.

The decline frome the peak looks remarkably similar across the three tiers since peak +12. This is interesting, since the low tier reached a considerably higher peak than the middle and high tiers, and it would be reasonable to assume that it will correct further. So far we have not seen that happen to a large degree. It will be interesting to see whether the HPI for the three tiers get closer over the next year.

(Home Price Indices, Standard & Poor’s, 11.25.2008)