Seattle Bubble

All righty, let’s catch up a bit on our Case-Shiller data. Fun fact: S&P totally redesigned their site while I was away, making the Case-Shiller data a lot harder to download all together. Anyway, according to June data that was released this week, Seattle-area home prices were:

Up 0.2 percent May to June
Up 6.5 percent YOY.
Up 41.5 percent from the July 2007 peak

Last year at this time prices were up 0.6 percent month-over-month and year-over-year prices were down 1.3 percent.

Seattle is currently ranked #2 in largest year-over-year price growth, only behind Phoenix at 9.0 percent growth.

Here’s a Tableau Public interactive graph of the year-over-year change for all twenty Case-Shiller-tracked cities. Check and un-check the boxes on the right to modify which cities are showing:

Here’s how the month-over-month price changes looked for all twenty markets:

Hit the jump for the rest of our monthly Case-Shiller charts, including the interactive chart of raw index data for all 20 metro areas.

There were eight metro areas that hit new all-time highs in April: Los Angeles, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Minneapolis, Charlotte, Portland, and Dallas.

Here’s the interactive chart of the raw HPI for all twenty metro areas through April.

Here’s an update to the peak-decline graph, inspired by a graph created by reader CrystalBall. This chart takes the twelve metro areas 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.

In the 155 months since the 2007 price peak in Seattle prices are up 41.5 percent.

Lastly, let’s see how Seattle’s current prices compare to the previous bubble inflation and subsequent burst. Note that this chart does not adjust for inflation.

We saw a pretty strong price spike in 2018, followed by a bit of a decline, but since then prices seem to be back to a pretty typical seasonal pattern of strong gains in the spring and only a slight reduction in the fall and winter.

Here’s the Seattle Times’ story about this month’s numbers: Seattle-area home prices rise faster than nearly every other U.S. city, driven in part by younger homebuyers

(Home Price Indices, Standard & Poor’s, 2020-08-25)

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