Seattle Bubble

There has been some discussion in the comments over the weekend about whether or not the current home price boom in the Seattle area is “unprecidented.” We have already explored the long-term home price trends in King County going back to 1946, but I thought it would be instructive to look at the data [...]

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There has been some great stuff coming out of our Seattle-area “alternative” real estate businesses Redfin and Zillow this week that deserve to be mentioned.
First up, Redfin came out with a great paper called Seven Tactics for Real Estate Bargaining. Check out their blog post announcing the study here. They analyzed recent sales [...]

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All right, after a bit of a technical glitch yesterday, things seem to be back to normal today, so it’s time for NWMLS July statistics.
Here’s the NWMLS press release: July’s Pending Home Sales Dip Slightly From June, Prices Edge Up.
Here is your summary along with the usual graphs and other updates.
Here’s your King County SFH [...]

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Here’s an interesting way to look at the Case-Shiller data: comparing the actual index values to theoretical values as they would look if they grew at a steady rate year-over-year.

The data starts in 1990 because that is the first year that the Case-Shiller index began tracking Seattle. 1990 may not be the best year [...]

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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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