Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

So I have heard people saying that the cost of SFH and condos in king county is holding steady. I kinda suspect this as I see the $/SQFT on redfin dropping in last couple of months. So does this mean that people are buying houses at the same price as last year but they are actually getting bigger/better houses than what they would have got last year?

Is there aany statistic that we can compare to confirm this? I think this would be a nice addition to the charts on seattlebubble. I can help out if I knew where to look for the data.

That sounds about right. That's what we're seeing up in the north end anyway.

(That's one of the things that median prices don't tell you--even if prices are holding steady, a more important question is what is that pricing getting you? It's getting you more today than it did a year ago.)

The Case-Shiller index is the closest tool that I'm aware of, as it compares same-house sales. Though it's possible to trick that too, by adding square footage to the house (I think so, at least).

Radarlogic reports sales per square foot. They show a 10% drop from peak in June, and an annualized rate of drop of ~17% for seattle. They use the same paired sales methodology as Case-shiller, and are kicking C/S but on trading volumes.

Ardell has some stats posted over at her blog for past six months.



Any critique from the experts?

scratch what I said about the paired sales - they do not use that method. they average cost/square over ALL sales, no exclusion of outliers

I will have a blog post on this later today. as soon as I figure out Tim's new template!