Craig's List Stats for Seattle Homes $200000-$400000
Here's my own little informal "bubble metric." My process every week or so:
1. Go to http://www.craigslist.org
2. Click on the "seattle" link under "us cities" on the right side of the page
3. Click on "real estate for sale"
4. In "search for:", put "seattle"
5. Make sure the drop-down list has "real estate for sale" selected
6. I put $200000 and $400000 as my min and max, because that's the range I'm willing to pay
7. I like to only tally listings with pictures (personal pref), so I check "has image"
With these search parameters, as of today, 5/9/2007, I get 272 listings. I'd like to formally tally this, and so I'll use this topic for that. I've actually been doing this for the past year, and unofficially, the number started at around 150. It crept up slowly by Thanksgiving last year to about 175. After the New Year, it's been steadily creeping up. Now that things are getting interesting, I'm going to officially track it.
Of course, if you look at the search results, you'll see a few duplicates come up, but the percentage seems to be pretty low (just eyeballing it). Also, even though you put "seattle" for the search key, some listings from outside Seattle get in there. Oh well, it's just an informal metric. Not like you can actually rely on MLS, or any other data set, either. But at least this puts a number on the local market for my price range.
Craig's List Query:
http://tinyurl.com/ysnljw
5/9/2007: 272 listings
1. Go to http://www.craigslist.org
2. Click on the "seattle" link under "us cities" on the right side of the page
3. Click on "real estate for sale"
4. In "search for:", put "seattle"
5. Make sure the drop-down list has "real estate for sale" selected
6. I put $200000 and $400000 as my min and max, because that's the range I'm willing to pay
7. I like to only tally listings with pictures (personal pref), so I check "has image"
With these search parameters, as of today, 5/9/2007, I get 272 listings. I'd like to formally tally this, and so I'll use this topic for that. I've actually been doing this for the past year, and unofficially, the number started at around 150. It crept up slowly by Thanksgiving last year to about 175. After the New Year, it's been steadily creeping up. Now that things are getting interesting, I'm going to officially track it.
Of course, if you look at the search results, you'll see a few duplicates come up, but the percentage seems to be pretty low (just eyeballing it). Also, even though you put "seattle" for the search key, some listings from outside Seattle get in there. Oh well, it's just an informal metric. Not like you can actually rely on MLS, or any other data set, either. But at least this puts a number on the local market for my price range.
Craig's List Query:
http://tinyurl.com/ysnljw
5/9/2007: 272 listings
Comments
So now I started tracking condos from $200k to $300K and have noticed that the inventory has increased quite a bit over the past several months.
On Seattle bubble we have been stating that YOY increases in properties fo sale, however the last few years were record years...so what would the charts look like over a 3 yr or 5 yr period. They look much more normal to what we historically have...just look at Tim's charts! The inventory is about in the normal range. Just making an observation
Which seller/agent in their right mind would consider craiglist a legitimate source of avenue? It is merely an addition to create traffic, but by no means it is close to being accurate.
I find this entire thread pointless and somewhat stupid.
Don't Craigslist posting expire after like a week? Do we know what percentage of unsold listings are relisted after expiration? That might make this a noisy data source.
As I said in the very first post of this thread, this was meant to be my own personal, informal metric, much like Lake Hills Renter's drive-by count in his/her(?) neighborhood. I understand that the source is totally noisy and probably completely bogus, given the extreme number of duplicates I see on my results query and the weekly expiration date. Point taken. I just thought it was personally interesting to ME and that is all. It's unfortunate that any update to any thread automatically brings it to the top, but hey, if you come here every single day (like I do, sadly), you get what, like 3-4 updates to any thread on any given day? Seriously, now...
"I find this entire thread pointless and somewhat stupid."
Hey guys, "Ubersalad" thinks this entire thread pointless and somewhat stupid.
How about just use notepad.
But this is so much more fun!
7/19/2007: 376 listings
I just figured you guys wanted the most read thread on the board
No, not really. I just thought it was something fun to do. Heck, I even got lazy for a couple weeks and aldreth probably thought it was interesting for some reason too and so he seems to also update the number once in a while. Look, I don't do graphs and charts for fun. I don't even care about statistics, or anything like that. I could care less about whether you use excel, matlab or frickin autocad...I'm an engineer, I don't have time for that crap. That's why this is in the forums and I'm not a blog contributor. What the hell are these forums for anyway?
07/20/07 - 355 Listings.