There have been a couple of discussions in the comments section in the last week or so about the relationship between home prices and incomes. I thought it would be a good time to queue up a post about the long-term price-to-income trends, where we are now, and what the possible outcomes could be. The…
Author: deejayoh
Update: Boom and Bust Cycles Across Markets
Back in July I posted a comparison of the total percentage gain during the boom years to the total percentage drop from peak to date across a bunch of markets, to see if I could establish a clear relationship or correlation between the two. I wanted to give a quick update on this analysis. As…
Comparing the US and Japanese Housing Bubbles
I have been looking for a graphic that accurately compared the Japanese and US housing bubbles for some time. Usually when you see this sort of thing, it compares US housing prices to Japanese land prices – as shown below in a chart clipped from the Economist. Comparison of US housing and Japanese land prices….
Falling from the outside in
One of the topics discussed frequently on this blog is the notion that prices in the suburbs are likely to fall much further and faster than prices in the urban core of Seattle. Yesterday Zillow posted their quarterly market update data. I will say that while I’m ambivalent about Zillow’s “Z-estimate” feature, which attempts to…
Comparing Boom and Bust Cycles Across Markets
The point has been made many times here that exposure to downturns needs to be viewed in the context of how much a market rose during the boom. I thought it would be interesting to test this by comparing the total percentage gain during the boom years to the total percentage drop from peak to…
A surge in “pent-up supply”?
I have a couple of RSS feeds from real estate sites that I use to monitor listings that might be of interest to me. They are targeted at a couple of neighborhoods, and focused on homes that are likely to be mid-century modern. Over the past couple of weeks, I had noted that the volume…
Local economic news looking like national headlines
There were a couple of stories in the Seattle Times over the weekend pertaining to the health of the local economy. The first was an article on the commercial real estate market, highlighting a forecast for falling rents. Commercial real-estate brokers James Keating and Sean Barnes have one word of advice for their clients looking…
Bad Real Estate Loans Hitting Local Banks
Over the weekend, the Seattle Times published an article titled Bad real-estate loans stack up for smaller local banks, about the exposure local banks have to real estate loans. The gist of the article was that many local banks, squeezed out of the mortgage business by the likes of WaMu and Countrywide, had doubled down…
Radar Logic Shows Seattle MSA Price per Square Foot Dropping at 17% per Year
Many of you are aware of the “Residential Property Index” published for the top 25 MSAs by Radar Logic. Radar Logic has a similar business model to MacroMarkets with the Case-Shiller Index (e.g., creating housing-based contracts to be traded on a futures market) but there are some key differences in the way that they calculate…
What happens to listings?
As a follow-on to Tim’s post yesterday about the practice of relisting properties, here is a look at what has been happening to inventory over the past few years, and how the trends have changed over time. The questions “what is happening with all of those listings” and “how many sellers just give up?” have…
Inventory Growing Like Gangbusters
As a follow on to Tim’s post yesterday about December stats – the thing that jumped out at me from his post was the growth in inventory. Given that there have been a few comments on the blog about home sales picking up, I thought a data-driven look at what is happening with active listings…
Portland worst, Seattle first
In my perusals of real-estate blogs this morning, I ran across a link to Housing Predictor, a site which has recently published a forecast for the top and worst performing housing markets in 2008. Housing Predictor describes their business as follows: We examine more than 20 micro market characteristics in each market place, including income…
NWMLS: Seattle off 1.5% YoY, King County off 1.1%
Quick post, NWMLS numbers have been released for December – showing that both Seattle and King County SFH have gone negative on a year-over-year basis. From Aubry Cohen at the PI The median selling price in December was $455,975 in SeattleInfolgedessen wenn Sie bequemem Vorratsbehalter online denken, überpruft Organisation Ihr Schotterhaufen oder Einkaufen auf Ihrer…
Rents to Rise, or Home Prices to Fall?
One of the arguments often discussed with respect to the housing bubble is the fact that the ratio of prices to rents has been fairly consistent on a historical basis, but that this ratio has been blown out in the past few years as home prices have shot up. Indeed, this can be seen in…
October Case-Shiller: Seattle’s Slide Picks Up Steam
The October data from from Case-Shiller has been released, showing that Seattle remained one of only three markets to have positive year over year returns (in addition to Portland and Charlotte), while posting it’s third straight month of declining real estate values: – Down 0.94% between September and October. – Up 3.30% YOY. We now…
Loonie-ness
Posted today over at MSNBC – sometimes viewed as a source of “news”, I found this tidbit. It looks like we’re gonna get bailed out by the Canucks! Phew As loonie surges, Canadians snap up US homes Snowbirds bring checkbooks to grab properties at deep discount CHANDLER, Ariz. – Two hours after his flight landed…
Your down payment could cost less than your latte
I got this in the mail earlier this week, and just had to share. Houses are still cheaper than latte’s, apparently… [Addendum] I clicked through to the site that the postcard directs you to. The “bonuses” are pretty significant relative to the starting prices, it seems to me. Buyer Bonuses at Select Communities For purchases…
Lawrence Yun confirms: Seattle is Special
Picked this up from Aubrey Cohen’s blog. Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist for the NAR and well-known real estate seer has confirmed what our local press and real estate folks have know for years: Seattle really is special! It’s about jobs and Microsoft millionaires. Why didn’t we think about that?!?! Seattle a “superstar” market Seattle is…
Washington Real Estate: 40% overvalued?
I ran across this very interesting analysis of the California real estate market by Goldman Sachs this weekend (PDF alert!). It is the author’s contention that in the past, changes real estate prices could be explained by two factors: disposable income and interest rates. They then go on to demonstrate, as shown below – how…
A Dose of Reality from the Everett Herald
I picked up this article off of The Housing Bubble this morning and thought it was worthy of a blog post. This is probably the least rosy depiction of the local real estate market I have seen from any of our local MSM outlets in the past few years. Selling a house? What to do now With…
Now is a good time to sell… NOT!
I’ve noticed a few posts in the comments and over in forums regarding inventory levels – which appear to be flat to down over the last couple of weeks. Given these I thought it was worth laying out a historical perspective on inventory levels. If you’ve delved into the Seattle Bubble spreadsheet, you know that…
Real Estate and Online Advertising
I ran across this chart about top online advertisers, and thought it was kind of interesting in light of events in the real estate market. I would assert that several of the top 10 are either directly or tangentially related to the real estate boom. #2 – Experian – credit reports. Not sure why they…
REALTOR® vs. Reality
Continuing The Tim’s trend of quick posts, I thought I would add this to the flurry of news today. King5 ran a news piece last night that is summarized in this article, entitled Home sellers upping incentives in crowded market The piece quotes Reba Haas, one of the contributors over at Rain City Guide. She…
If we’re at the top, where do we go from here?
Many of you may have read my previous post that tied the performance of the Case-Shiller index to the growth in inventory. Since then, I’ve done a bit more tweaking of that model – which has proven to be reasonably consistent with actual results over the past few months. Better on the YoY figure than…
Trendspotting
I’ve been gone a couple weeks on vacation, out of the country – where I was blissfully disconnected from the internet and all news of the US economy. In the course of catching up on goings on, I surfed over to Altos Research to see what they were reporting. I clicked through a number of…
More Median Price Musings
Last week Tim had a great post on median prices, where he looked at sales by area of the county, and showed that sales had remained strong in the high end locations while they had dropped away in the lower-priced areas. It was great analysis, and it got the wheels turning in my head –…
The Mythical Equity Locust
There are many arguments to be had between the Seattle Bubble housing bulls and bears, but one belief that seems to be commonly shared is that one of the primary drivers of demand and pricing in our market is a steady stream of rich Californians moving up and driving prices up. The bulls argue that…
Why Inventory Matters
A Note From The Tim: I’d like to welcome Deejayoh as a poster to the blog. His contributions to the forum have been vast, interesting, and informative. I’m happy to help him bring his insightful analysis to a larger audience. He is a great asset to this community. Click on any of the images in…