Seattle Bubble

According to the latest data, it looks like the state economy is slowly catching up to the unwinding national economy.
More than 3,000 jobs were lost in Washington last month, pushing the unemployment rate to 4.9 percent, up from a near record low of 4.5 percent in February, the Employment Security Department said Tuesday.
The change is [...]

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It’s time for another reporting roundup. Let’s see what the local newspapers have to say about January’s not-so-positive numbers from the NWMLS. Will they claim that the market “bottoming out” and about to jump into full recovery mode? Or maybe they have finally come to accept the fact that Seattle will not [...]

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Golly, this housing slump sure isn’t much fun (for never-ending appreciation-believers and real estate agents), is it? But hey, at least it’s almost over, right? Wait, what’s that you say? It’s not going to get better soon? Pfft. You’re just some doom-and-gloom blogger, why should we listen to you?
Except, that [...]

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From above the fold on today’s Seattle Times front page:

Click to view pdf
How soon do you suppose we can expect an article explicitly making the claim that is subtly implied by this headline / photo combo? Let’s play “predict the headline.” Here’s my guess: Soaring Loonie Strengthens Seattle Real Estate. Of course, [...]

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One of the most frequent arguments you’ll hear if you ask someone to try to justify Seattle’s high home prices is job growth. It usually sounds something like this: “We’ve got Boeing and Microsoft, and all these highly-paid, high-tech jobs are continually being added to our strong economy.”
Well, as you all know, we’ve [...]

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The stories have been piling up in my inbox at a faster rate than I’ve been able to post them lately, so that means that it is time for another bubble link roundup. I’ve got a lot of ground to cover in this post, and I don’t want to totally clutter up the front [...]

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