Here’s a little chart I whipped up that I thought was interesting. I pulled up a list of all the single-family homes sold for $1 million dollars over the last ten years in King County and averaged the square footage of the homes sold each year.
The data from 2000 and 2001 was a little sparse (just three and five sales respectively), so I don’t think the big spike up in 2002 tells us all that much.
Not surprisingly, the size of the average million-dollar home in King County dropped by nearly a full third between the 2004 peak and the 2007 trough. And if you’re in the market for a million-dollar home today, it looks like you’re pretty likely to get a home even bigger than the average sized million-dollar home in 2004.
Considerring What $600K Bought You In Centrist Seattle a Few Years Ago
It would be interesting to see pictures of Centrist Seattle $1M homes, even today, with an idea of how much land you got and where you’ll park the cars….
IMO they don’t look like a million dollars….LOL
Why look at just $1 million homes? Why not just do (square footage)/dollar of all homes sold in Seattle in order to increase your sample size? If you wanted to, you could break this up into tiers.
The chart is interesting, and the trend from ’04-’10 is intuitively justifiable. However, when you tell me to ignore two data points as unreliable because of a low sample size, it immediately makes me question the validity of the rest of the data points.
Tim, how did you define homes sold for a million dollars and whose search function and/or data base did you use? Did it include only homes sold for exactly 1 mil or perhaps give or take 1%? Or, did it include all homes sold for 1 mil or more? Three sales in King Co in 2000 seems too low unless it was limited to properties that sold for exactly 1 mil. Basically I’m just curious as to what caused the number to be only 3 and 5 sales in 2000 and 2001 and whether the sample size in later years was large enough to have statistical significance without a huge margin of error. Thanks.
By masaba @ 2:
Because running a 10-year sample on all homes sold would return search results too big. I used Redfin’s sold property search, which won’t give you results at all if there are more than 500 matches to your query.
RE: One Eyed Man @ 3 – Due to the search limitation mentioned above, I limited the search only to homes that sold for exactly $1 million. If somebody pointed me toward a downloadable comprehensive database of all homes sold in King County over the last 10 years I would love to do a more detailed analysis like what you suggested.
RE: The Tim @ 4 –
Thanks Tim!
RE: The Tim @ 4 –
The king county assessors site has downloadable files that contain every property in the county and their sales info.
By drshort @ 6:
Here: http://info.kingcounty.gov/assessor/DataDownload/default.aspx
RE: drshort @ 7 – Thanks for the link. I’ve downloaded that in the past and tried to get some useful info out of it, and the biggest obstacle was that there is no easy way in their database to determine whether a property is SFH, condo, townhome, commercial, land, etc.