Seattle Bubble

I thought it would be fun to check back in with an update on the San Diego / King County home price comparison I made back in March.
As of the latest Case-Shiller data (February) home prices San Diego have fallen 24% from their November 2006 peak. The Seattle area has dropped 6.5% from its [...]

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Here’s an interesting comparison.
As of December’s Case-Shiller data, prices in San Diego County have fallen nearly 20% from their November 2005 peak. As of last month, their median price for all homes sold (single-family and condos) was $415,000 (source: San Diego Union-Tribune).
In the Seattle area, December’s Case-Shiller put prices off 4% from their July [...]

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I think it’s a good time to revisit the median price discussion that I first brought up last August.
The median price is a decent indicator of the general direction of home prices, but it definitely has shortcomings. The biggest problem is that the median is largely influenced by the mix of sales between high [...]

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The prediction (emphasis added):
When July’s housing stats came out last week, the most confusing piece of data was that despite skyrocketing local inventory and tightening lending across the nation, the median price still jumped up 2.3% from June, bouncing back into double-digit YOY territory at a 10.6% increase since July 2006.
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I believe that almost all [...]

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I’ve been gone a couple weeks on vacation, out of the country - where I was blissfully disconnected from the internet and all news of the US economy. In the course of catching up on goings on, I surfed over to Altos Research to see what they were reporting. I clicked through a [...]

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Last week Tim had a great post on median prices, where he looked at sales by area of the county, and showed that sales had remained strong in the high end locations while they had dropped away in the lower-priced areas. It was great analysis, and it got the wheels turning in my head - [...]

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