This is a fairly arbitrary measure, but it jumped out to me when I was looking at the chart of yearly home prices in yesterday’s NWMLS post. Between May and September this year, the median sale price of single-family homes in King County has fallen 8.0 percent. Most years home prices rise between May and September. The biggest decline between those months in previous years was 5.7 percent in 2008.
I’m still not yet comfortable saying that we’re going to see year-over-year price drops soon, but looking at the trend in this data I wouldn’t be surprised if we do before the end of 2018.