Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin.
Yesterday over on the Redfin blog, I dug a little deeper into the conforming loan limit changes, pulling detailed sales data from all around the country by zip code to see which areas would be most affected by the change.
The result was another Google FusionTables zip code heat map. Below I have embedded the Seattle area. Note that to calculate the percent of sales that would be affected, I assumed 20% down. Click on any zip code to see the breakdown. Red represents 20% or more affected, Orange for 10% to <20%, Yellow for 5% to <10%, and Blue for <5%.
As I pointed out a couple weeks ago, for most of the Seattle area, the change is a non-event. The use of the word “hardest” in the headline is highly relative. For most of the Seattle area well under 5% of homes fall between the two limits. Over on the Eastside there are a few areas that creep up to around 10% affected, and one—South Sammamish—that hits almost 25%.
It will be interesting to see if sales in the red and orange areas on the map take any sort of hit over the next few months beyond what we would expect to see due to regular seasonality.