It has been a while since we last looked at one of our primary housing bubble metrics: local home prices compared to incomes. In the next chart I am 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 […]
Gene Balk posted an interesting piece on the Seattle Times last week that explores how the number of low, middle, and high income households have grown or shrunk around King County since 2000: Mapping King County’s disappearing middle class The map is cool (click through to the article for an interactive version), and Gene’s overall […]
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 […]
Local home prices gone from undervalued to overvalued in just a year. In January 2013, Seattle-area home prices as measured by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index were four or five percent below where local per capita incomes would suggest they should have been and one percent below where rents suggested. By December 2013, massive gains […]
It’s been a while since we’ve taken look at how local home prices compare to local incomes, so let’s update those charts. First, let’s check out the ratio between home prices and per capita income from the BEA: Overall the Seattle area is just a little bit above the long-term average, and almost entirely thanks […]
By request, here’s an update to my table of housing stats for the top 30 largest cities in the country. Actually this time it’s the top 31, since Las Vegas got ousted from #30 by Oklahoma City the last time I did this list (in late 2010). Also of note: Detroit’s ongoing dramatic decline in […]