Craig's List Stats for Seattle Homes $200000-$400000

[dgeng265]

Here's my own little informal "bubble metric." My process every week or so:

1. Go to
2. Click on the "seattle" link under "us cities" on the right side of the page
3. Click on "real estate for sale"
4. In "search for:", put "seattle"
5. Make sure the drop-down list has "real estate for sale" selected
6. I put $200000 and $400000 as my min and max, because that's the range I'm willing to pay
7. I like to only tally listings with pictures (personal pref), so I check "has image"

With these search parameters, as of today, 5/9/2007, I get 272 listings. I'd like to formally tally this, and so I'll use this topic for that. I've actually been doing this for the past year, and unofficially, the number started at around 150. It crept up slowly by Thanksgiving last year to about 175. After the New Year, it's been steadily creeping up. Now that things are getting interesting, I'm going to officially track it.

Of course, if you look at the search results, you'll see a few duplicates come up, but the percentage seems to be pretty low (just eyeballing it). Also, even though you put "seattle" for the search key, some listings from outside Seattle get in there. Oh well, it's just an informal metric. Not like you can actually rely on MLS, or any other data set, either. But at least this puts a number on the local market for my price range.

Craig's List Query:



5/9/2007: 272 listings

[dgeng265]

5/12/2007: 317 listings

[finance]

I have been doing the same thing on zipreality.com. I still look at condos from $150 - $250 and have noticed that the inventory numbers declinding...yet suspect that over the past year it was due to the floor rate of condos increaseing above the $250k range...nothing more than that I believe.

So now I started tracking condos from $200k to $300K and have noticed that the inventory has increased quite a bit over the past several months.

On Seattle bubble we have been stating that YOY increases in properties fo sale, however the last few years were record years...so what would the charts look like over a 3 yr or 5 yr period. They look much more normal to what we historically have...just look at Tim's charts! The inventory is about in the normal range. Just making an observation

[mike2]

Not sure 3-5 years will be meaningful either since the dot com bust really depressed local condo construction. If you remember back in 02, ANY new construction project stuck out like a sore thumb.

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

5/24/2007: 331 listings

[dgeng265]

5/26/2007: 363 listings

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

6/6/2007: 387 listings

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

[dgeng265]

[aldreth]

6/25/2007: 474 listings