Below is a figure in which median price is normalized to the median price for Jan 02. Essentially, I simply divided the median price for any given month by the median price for Jan 02. This allows one to compare different markets to each other because price varies from county to county. These are normalized data for SFH+Condos for King, Sno, and Pierce.
All three counties track each other pretty well, except that Pierce County seems to have seen a slightly greater rate of change over the last two to three years, but not much of a difference.
So what about SFH alone:
Seems basically the same as the first figure. OK, well, how about the condos alone:
Ah, here we go. It looks like the condo market in Pierce Co started to go bananas at about October 03. (or I should say more bananas than the other two counties).
Another way to see this to look at YOY change in median price for the three counties:
YOY change is basically a derivative of the normalized data. You can see that during Fall 03 Pierce condo prices were going bonkers relative to King and Sno. If you look at the last 6 months or so, Pierce condo prices have started to tank while King and Sno stay strong.
There could be a lot of reasons for this phenomenon. Perhaps a lot of expensive condos came on-line Fall of 2003 in Tacoma. Or it could be that lower priced condos aren't selling as well as high priced condos. There are lots of other reasons. But it's pretty clear that the pink pony brigade doesn't go south of SeaTac.