Here’s another update to our monthly sales spread histogram for King County SFH sales. According to my preliminary analysis of May data, the median price of SFH homes sold in May will probably rise around another $10,000 to about $385,000. However, this isn’t because homes are suddenly gaining value, but rather because people just bought more expensive homes in May, as you can see when you compare May to April in the interactive chart below.
In April, 44.5% of the sales were less than $350,000, 44.0% were $350,000 to under $700,000, and 11.4% were over $700,000. In May, the under $350,000 bracket dropped to 41.3%, the $350,000 to $700,000 bracket rose to 45.2%, and the over $700,000 bracket rose to 13.6%.
Just a little heads up in advance of the NWMLS press release that will come out sometime in the next few days, leading all the local papers to crow about “rising prices.”
Remember, rising median sales price is not the same as rising prices. For a refresher course, hit these three posts:
- August 2007: Median Price Not Telling the Whole Truth
- July 2009: Median Price Still Being Distorted by Geographic Shifts in Sales
- March 2010: Declines in King’s Median Price Softened by Sales Shifts
Bonus: For those of you who are interested in how the closed sales break down between regular sales and short sales, look no further than this handy color-coded version of the above chart:
