Reuters: Seattle, Manhattan could be next housing downturn

The_Tim

Seattle, Manhattan could be next housing downturn

Seattle, wake up and smell the coffee, your housing prices may be falling faster than foam on a latte.

Seattle, whose job growth from such companies as Boeing Co, Microsoft Corp, Google Inc and Starbucks Corp, is seeing the strength of its housing market eroding, Jonathan Miller, Radar Logic director of research, said on Tuesday at the Reuters Housing Summit.

Seattle has ranked about the top of all the U.S. housing markets over the past few years, Miller said. Prices have appreciated at about 12 percent to 16 percent yearly.

This past summer, the appreciation rate fell to 9 percent. Today its stands at about 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, the inventory of unsold homes in that market climbed at 40 percent over the last year.

"You can really see a top market like Seattle, which has been consistently performing well, going into the red," said Miller.

I'll probably wait until tomorrow to post this story, since I want the home price graph to stay at the top for a while.

Oh, and I predict that the graph post will draw Steve Tytler back to the comments, to tell us that we can't just rely on numbers, that analyzing the housing market is an art and you have to rely on your gut. Or something like that.

deejayoh

I've been looking at the radarlogic data pretty closely for the last couple of months. It's nice that you can get daily updates, and apparently they are kicking case-shiller's butt on trading volume.

According to their data, Seattle "peaked" on 6/26/07 at $236.07/sq ft - and is off 7.5% from that per their latest quote ($218.38 as of 12/14/07). Based on the 28-day moving average that's an annualized rate of decline of just over 16%!!!

I can't seem to find futures quotes for Seattle.rpx index. That would be interesting data to have.

Lake Hills Renter

But haven't you heard, Tim? Microsoft is breaking ground on 100 million sq ft for 300k employees. As long as Microsoft is raising buildings, the housing market is perfectly peachy, because every employee makes $500k/yr and singlehandedly drives up net in-migration and drives down unemployment rates.

perfectfire

Lake Hills Renter wrote:

...singlehandedly drives up net in-migration and drives down unemployment rates.

Well, I did have a baby in December, but I wasn't able to do it single handedly if you know what I mean .

rose-colored-coolaid

Lake Hills Renter wrote:

But haven't you heard, Tim? Microsoft is breaking ground on 100 million sq ft for 300k employees. As long as Microsoft is raising buildings, the housing market is perfectly peachy, because every employee makes $500k/yr and singlehandedly drives up net in-migration and drives down unemployment rates.

Lake Hills Renter, you can now save time when making posts about all the new employees and buildings that MSFT is hiring/constructing. Just do this.

<Markor>MSFT-Bellevue</Markor>. In my web browser, that tag automatically expands to explain just how quickly MSFT is growing.