{"id":889,"date":"2007-06-22T11:31:10","date_gmt":"2007-06-22T18:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/22\/seattles-sellers-market-status-rapidly-eroding\/"},"modified":"2010-01-18T19:30:40","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T03:30:40","slug":"seattles-sellers-market-status-rapidly-eroding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/22\/seattles-sellers-market-status-rapidly-eroding\/","title":{"rendered":"Seattle&#8217;s &#8220;Seller&#8217;s Market&#8221; Status Rapidly Eroding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Forbes has come out with yet another real estate &#8220;Top 10&#8221; list, this time gabbing on about the &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/realestate\/2007\/06\/21\/home-market-seller-forbeslife-cx_mw_0622realestate.html\" title=\"Top Home Sellers' Markets\">Top Home Sellers&#8217; Markets<\/a>.&#8221;  Interestingly, Seattle is conspicuously absent from the list.  They explain:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><b>The Methodology<\/b><br \/>To measure inventory glut, we used Moody&#8217;s Economy.com and National Association of Realtors data that tracked a market&#8217;s current sales rate by projecting the amount of time it would take to sell off the excess housing stock at the current rate of sales.<\/p>\n<p>We also looked at the change in sales rate over the last year to measure the relative tightening or loosening of the market. Finally, a measure of price stability was applied so as to prevent the list from being a rundown of upstart markets.<\/p>\n<p>The measurements left out a few cities that lacked comprehensive data. Seattle, for example, has incredibly strong market fundamentals&mdash;the lowest vacancy rate of major metros at 0.9% and is a small geographic area not conducive to overproduction. It is a good seller&#8217;s market, but for tracking what we were after, Seattle data was incomplete for our analysis.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure why their data was &#8220;incomplete&#8221; for Seattle, and I imagine that if they had access to everything they were looking for, it probably would have been on their list.  However, while Seattle might be a better sellers&#8217; market than most of the country, all indications are that we have been granted only a temporary reprieve.<\/p>\n<p>While the language in the article makes their calculations sound fancy and complicated, it would appear that their primary measure of whether a city has a good &#8220;sellers&#8217; market&#8221; comes by dividing the total monthly sales by the current number of homes for sale.  This is commonly referred to as &#8220;months of supply&#8221; (MOS), but they are referring to it as the &#8220;rate of sales.&#8221;  Here&#8217;s a graph of King County&#8217;s SFH from 2005 to the present:<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin: 5px auto; font-size: 0.8em; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcomonthsofsupply200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH MOS - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcomonthsofsupply200705-tn.png\" style=\"border: 1px solid #000000; margin: 5px;\" title=\"King County SFH MOS - Click to enlarge\" alt=\"King County SFH MOS\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\"><\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcomonthsofsupply200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH MOS - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\">Click to enlarge<\/a><\/div>\n<p>Forbes mentions that they &#8220;also looked at the change in sales rate over the last year to measure the relative tightening or loosening of the market.&#8221;  As you can see, the Seattle market can only be described as &#8220;loosening.&#8221;  At the end of May, MOS stood at 3.02, up 59% from last May&#8217;s value of 1.89, which was itself up 18% from the May 2005 value of 1.61.<\/br ><br \/>Sales have been declining at an average rate of 10% year-to-year for the past 19 months:<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin: 5px auto; font-size: 0.8em; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcosales200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH Sales - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcosales200705-tn.png\" style=\"border: 1px solid #000000; margin: 5px;\" title=\"King County SFH Sales - Click to enlarge\" alt=\"King County SFH Sales\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\"><\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcosales200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH Sales - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\">Click to enlarge<\/a><\/div>\n<p>While inventory has been increasing by over 24% year-to-year for over a year:<\/p>\n<div style=\"margin: 5px auto; font-size: 0.8em; text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcoinventory200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH Inventory - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcoinventory200705-tn.png\" style=\"border: 1px solid #000000; margin: 5px;\" title=\"King County SFH Inventory - Click to enlarge\" alt=\"King County SFH Inventory\" width=\"400\" height=\"266\"><\/a><br \/><a href=\"http:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/06\/kingcoinventory200705.png\" title=\"King County SFH Inventory - Click to enlarge\" rel=\"lightbox[889]\">Click to enlarge<\/a><\/div>\n<p>Is Seattle presently a seller&#8217;s market?  Probably.  Will it still be a seller&#8217;s market by the end of the year?<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Outlook not so good.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>(<i>Matt Woolsey, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.forbes.com\/realestate\/2007\/06\/21\/home-market-seller-forbeslife-cx_mw_0622realestate.html\" title=\"Top Home Sellers' Markets\">Forbes.com<\/a>, 06.22.2007<\/i>)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forbes has come out with yet another real estate &#8220;Top 10&#8221; list, this time gabbing on about the &#8220;Top Home Sellers&#8217; Markets.&#8221; Interestingly, Seattle is conspicuously absent from the list. They explain: The MethodologyTo measure inventory glut, we used Moody&#8217;s Economy.com and National Association of Realtors data that tracked a market&#8217;s current sales rate by&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[612,613,198],"tags":[90,89,129,135,200,190],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local","category-national-news","category-news","tag-seattle_is_special","tag-forbes","tag-inventory","tag-months-of-supply","tag-statistics","tag-woolsey"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.2 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Seattle&#039;s &quot;Seller&#039;s Market&quot; Status Rapidly Eroding \u2022 Seattle Bubble<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/seattlebubble.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/22\/seattles-sellers-market-status-rapidly-eroding\/\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:title\" content=\"Seattle&#039;s &quot;Seller&#039;s Market&quot; Status Rapidly Eroding \u2022 Seattle Bubble\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:description\" content=\"Forbes has come out with yet another real estate &#8220;Top 10&#8221; list, this time gabbing on about the &#8220;Top Home Sellers&#8217; Markets.&#8221; Interestingly, Seattle is conspicuously absent from the list. 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