Like the price to rent ratio, it’s been over a year since we visited the subject of Seattle’s home price to income ratio, so let’s take another look. Here’s how the ratio stacks up when you use King County median household income data from the OFM: Not too different from what we saw in yesterday’s…
Category: Features
Big Picture Week: Price to Rent Ratio
It’s been over a year since we last checked in on Seattle’s price to rent ratio. Let’s see how that metric looks over the last twenty years [Update: I changed the chart below to reflect the annual rent. Here’s the original based on monthly rent.]: It is interesting to note that thanks to semi-flatening home…
Big Picture Week: Examining Home Affordability
In one of the first responses to yesterday’s look at Seattle’s long-term Case-Shiller Home Price Index Ross Peterson brought up a good point: So equivalent annual income increase did not keep up with the housing prices increase but did the buying power keep up with the increase? I think the interests rates have fallen in…
Big Picture Week: Case-Shiller HPI Rate of Increase
We spend a lot of time on here talking about month-to-month changes in this or that index, looking for signs of what’s coming next in the housing market. This close scrutiny certainly has its place, but sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back and look at things in more of a long-term historical context….
Real Actual Home Staging: Take 1
I spent some time yesterday afternoon browsing some open houses just for kicks—a first for me. While some of the homes I looked at were set up quite nicely (this one in particular—sweet retro styling), others left me wondering: What were they thinking? By “they” I mean both the home seller and the seller’s agent,…