local real estate news, statistics, and commentary without the sales spin.
It’s time once again to take an updated look at how King County’s sales are shifting between the different regions around the county, since geographic shifts can and do affect the median price. In order to explore this concept, we break King County down into three regions, based on the NWMLS-defined “areas”: low end: South…
This poll was active 08.17.2014 through 08.23.2014
Continuing our “Another Bubble?” series, it’s time to take a look at the affordability index. As King County’s median home price has surged from $405,400 in February to $468,000 in July, the affordability index has dropped from slightly above the long-term average to just below 100. An index level above 100 indicates that the monthly…
Continuing the “Another Bubble?” series we began yesterday, let’s take a look at another housing bubble metric: home prices compared to incomes. For this post I’ll be using the Case-Shiller Home Price Index for the Seattle area (which rolls together King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties) and Bureau of Economic Analysis data on per capita incomes…
With home prices approaching or even exceeding their 2007 peak levels in parts of the Seattle area, there has been renewed talk about whether we’re in another housing bubble or not. This week I’d like to go back to the same data I used in 2005 and 2006 to definitively recognize the bubble at a…