By The Tim on August 31, 2009
Please consider the following excerpt from a post I wrote that was originally published on the personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly (and later here):
…if home buying is like a savings plan, it’s probably the worst savings plan on Earth. Would you voluntarily sign up for a savings plan where well over half of the [...]
Posted in Features | Tagged bought at the peak, buy-vs-rent, equity, fundamentals, mythbusting, rent, saving, Stock Market
By The Tim on August 14, 2009
Here’s an update to the area-wide price-to-income and price-to-rent ratio charts we first posted back in April.
These charts are based on per capita income, “Median Contract Rent” (from 2005 adjusted using the “rent of primary residence” component of the CPI), and Case-Shiller home prices indexed to the county-wide median. They are not intended to [...]
Posted in Statistics | Tagged affordability, fundamentals, income, price-to-income, price-to-rent, rent
By deejayoh on June 1, 2009
There have been a couple of discussions in the comments section in the last week or so about the relationship between home prices and incomes. I thought it would be a good time to queue up a post about the long-term price-to-income trends, where we are now, and what the possible outcomes could be.
The analysis [...]
Posted in Features, Statistics | Tagged fundamentals, income, long-term, PCI, price-to-income
By The Tim on April 2, 2009
Inspired by this post from Rich Toscano down in San Diego showing that home prices there have reached historically reasonable levels when compared to rents and incomes, I thought I would put together some similar charts for Seattle to see how close we are to reasonable home prices.
Here’s the chart for home prices to per [...]
Posted in Statistics | Tagged affordability, fundamentals, income, price-to-income, price-to-rent, rent
By The Tim on February 6, 2009
Wasn’t it just a year ago that we were still being regaled with stories about how tight the housing supply was in the Seattle area, and how our population has been growing so fast that construction just couldn’t keep up, so of course high home prices and increasing rents are going to continue forever and [...]
Posted in News | Tagged fundamentals, rent
By The Tim on January 5, 2009
Some of you may recall back in February last year, when the Seattle Times ran a story about UW professor Theo Eicher’s land use regulations study, with the headline declaring “Rules add $200,000 to Seattle house price.”
Here at Seattle Bubble we had serious questions about the dramatic conclusion in that study, and the methods that [...]
Posted in News | Tagged demand, economics, fundamentals, growth_management, regulation
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