According to the latest data from the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, the home price bust in Seattle is gaining steam again.
Down 0.2% May to June.
Down 7.1% YOY.
Last year prices rose 0.65% from May to June, and year-over-year prices were up 7.9%.
Here’s the usual graph, with L.A. & San Diego offset from Seattle & Portland by 17 months. With a drop of “just” 5.8%, Portland’s year-over-year numbers have been out-performing Seattle for seven months now.
This graph is not intended to be predictive. It’s just an interesting exercise to see how closely the Pacific Northwest is tracking the ground already covered by Southern California.
Here’s the graph of all twenty Case-Shiller-tracked cities:
Six of twenty cities experienced smaller year-over-year drops than Seattle in June. Charlotte at -1.0%, Dallas at -3.3%, Denver at -4.7%, Boston at -5.2%, Portland at -5.8%, and New York at -6.9%. The largest year-over-year drop was in Miami, where prices plummeted over 28% from June 2007. Ouch.
Here’s an update to the peak-decline graph, inspired by a graph created by reader CrystalBall. This chart takes the twelve cities whose peak index was greater than 175, and tracks how far they have fallen so far from their peak. The horizontal axis shows the total number of months since each individual city peaked.
Eleven months off our peak, the drop in Seattle has improved slightly, and is now only worse than ten of the twelve “bubble cities” were at this same amount of time from their respective peaks. Only Miami and Tampa had dropped more than Seattle’s 7.3%.
Here’s the “rewind” chart. The horizontal range is selected to go back just far enough to find the last time that Seattle’s HPI was as low as it is now. This gives us a clean visual of just how far back prices have retreated in terms of months.
Well, we can definitely say that March wasn’t the bottom. The index for Seattle dropped to a new post-peak low in June at 178.28, just a hair below March’s value of 178.29. Prices have been holding somewhat steady at June 2006 levels for four months now. Will the summer and fall bring a continued drop, or is early summer 2006 as far as Seattle will “rewind”?
Check back tomorrow for a post on the Case-Shiller data for Seattle’s price tiers.
(Home Price Indices, Standard & Poor’s, 08.26.2008)