Seattle Bubble

For those that continue to insist that home prices around Seattle are high because “supply isn’t keeping up with demand,” I would like to point out the 2007 King County Buildable Lands Report.
This is what the report has to say about building activity in King County from 2001 through 2005:

King County gained more than 49,000 [...]

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This is a post that I originally wrote for the highly-recommended personal finance blog Get Rich Slowly. As such, the style of writing is more geared toward the audience of that site. However, I felt that the post would be of interest to the readers here as well, so I am re-posting it [...]

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For those of you that are interested in more lengthy reading, a new paper by Robert Shiller (as in Case-Shiller) was released this weekend: Understanding Recent Trends in House Prices and Home Ownership (pdf).
Here are a couple of money quotes:
It does not appear possible to explain the boom in terms of fundamentals such as [...]

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There are many arguments to be had between the Seattle Bubble housing bulls and bears, but one belief that seems to be commonly shared is that one of the primary drivers of demand and pricing in our market is a steady stream of rich Californians moving up and driving prices up. The bulls argue that [...]

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I’m compiling two lists for future posts, and I’d like to enlist the help you, the intelligent readers, to help assure the lists are as complete as possible. The purpose of the posts will be to list common real estate myths and briefly debunk them one by one. Many common myths have had [...]

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I am hoping someone here will be able to clear this one up for me.
One of the frequently-repeated arguments that real estate salesmen use to try to convince the renter-serfs to buy a home is that once you buy a home, your costs are fixed. While that’s not entirely true (taxes, insurance, and maintenance [...]

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