After spending a couple days looking at incomes and home prices, let’s throw interest rates into the mix as well with an updated look at affordability. As a brief refresher, here’s the formula for calculating the affordability index: While we discuss the broad county-wide affordability trends, don’t forget that you can also play around with…
Tag: big-picture
Seattle Home Prices Back in Line with Per Capita Incomes
There has been a lot of talk the last week or so in the comments about home prices and incomes. I’ve linked up my September post on the topic a few times, but I thought it would be nice to run an update since it’s been half a year. Here’s my conclusion from that post:…
Big Picture Week: Unemployment and Foreclosures
To close out the week, let’s have a look at a couple of factors that are continuing to drag the local housing market down: unemployment and foreclosures. From 1990 through 2006, the average unemployment rate in King County was 4.9%. The unemployment rate is currently 8.0% (63% higher than the 1990-2006 average). Over that same…
Big Picture Week: Price to Income Ratio
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…
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…