Seattle Bubble Blog
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Seattle Bubble is the Seattle area's #1 resource for news, analysis, commentary, and community discussion on the local real estate market. It discusses articles on economy, neighborhoods, features, opinions, polls, and more.
Seattle Bubble Blog
1y ago
As of February, the monthly payment for the median-price single-family home sold in King County at current mortgage rates was $3,945.
The good news: This is down from an eye-watering $4,758 in October.
The bad news: This is up dramatically from just a year prior, and 59% higher than what we saw at the peak of the previous housing bubble.
Even if you adjust the July 2007 peak payment for inflation, it only comes out to about $3,586 in 2023 dollars, meaning that the October 2022 peak was 34% higher, and as of February homebuyers are still looking at payments 10% above the highest level recorded ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
1y ago
Let’s check up on what’s happening with the Seattle-area housing market in early 2023, shall we?
Here’s a look at the median home sale price for King County:
As you can see, not only are home prices down year over year (7%), but they’re also down 20% from the May peak, and with another month of flat prices, will be down from 2021 levels, as well. This is great news, of course it is entirely offset by the surge in mortgage rates that had been held artificially low for over a decade back to a more typical level over 6%.
Here’s how the Seattle area stacks up to the rest of the nation, according ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
2y ago
Since we’ve been gone for so long, I thought I’d start back up with somewhat of an overview post. Let’s just take a look at what’s going on in the Seattle-area (King County) housing market recently.
One of the biggest topics on everybody’s mind lately is home prices, so let’s start there. The median price of single-family homes sold in King County in February was $857,750, up 14% from a year earlier.
As you can see, prices are down slightly from the all-time high of $871,000 back in July, but over the past few years they have really shot up at a ridiculously fast pace. That said, home afforda ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
2y ago
Hey, just a quick note to let you know that I’m working on cleaning house here. This includes completely disabling and hiding comments, which have gotten totally out of control and frankly do not add value to the site. It’s possible I may come up with some solution to add comments again in the future, but for now, they’re completely disabled. If you want to share some thoughts with me, feel free to drop me a line directly via the contact form.
I’m also working on updating my data, and will work on posting new updates here at least once a week. The market is still pretty crappy for homebuyers ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
Get access to the full spreadsheets used to make the charts in this and other posts, and support the ongoing work on this site by becoming a member of Seattle Bubble.
Let’s take a look at our stats for the local regions outside of the King/Snohomish core. Here’s your October update to our “Around the Sound” statistics for Pierce, Kitsap, Thurston, Island, Skagit, and Whatcom counties.
Things are looking pretty similar all around the Puget Sound region—extremely low supply, high demand, and skyrocketing prices. The one tiny bright spot for buyers is that new listings are higher than they were a ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
Get access to the full spreadsheets used to make the charts in this and other posts, as well as a variety of additional insider benefits by becoming a member of Seattle Bubble.
October market data from the NWMLS is available. Here’s what happened last month in the Seattle-area housing market: Home prices and pending sales fell slightly, but closed sales rose to the highest level ever seen during an October—over 3,000 sales. The previous record for closed sales during an October was 2,922 sales in 2003. October this year saw 20% more sales than the highest October level in the last ten years (2 ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
Reminder: Subscribers have access to the members-only spreadsheets folder, which is updated with the charts in this post.
As promised last week, here’s an updated look at the “affordable home” price chart.
In this graph I flip the variables in the affordability index calculation around to other sides of the equation to calculate what price home the a family earning the median household income could “afford” to buy at today’s mortgage rates, if they spent 30% of their monthly gross income on their home payment. Don’t forget that this math includes the (giant) assumption that the home buyers are ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
Seattle Bubble spreadsheets are updated even when content isn’t frequently posted. You can get access to the spreadsheets by becoming a member of Seattle Bubble.
It’s been quite a while since we’ve had a look at our affordability index charts for the counties around Puget Sound, so let’s have a look at those charts. As of August, the affordability index currently sits at 95.1, which is somewhat lower than the 1993-2002 average of 107.6, but not ridiculously lower. For context, 69 percent of the 331 months on record back through 1993 have had a higher affordability index than what we had in Aug ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
Get access to the full spreadsheets used to make the charts in this and other posts, as well as a variety of additional insider benefits by becoming a member of Seattle Bubble.
August market stats were published by the NWMLS on Friday before the holiday weekend. The King County median price of single-family homes rose over 10 percent year-over-year for the first time since May of 2018. Inventory is way down from a year ago, and pending sales climbed to an all-time record high.
Recession? What recession?
Before we get into our detailed monthly stats, here’s a quick look at their press release ..read more
Seattle Bubble Blog
3y ago
You can always get access to the Seattle Bubble spreadsheets by supporting my ongoing work as a member of Seattle Bubble. Yes, I’m still keeping these spreadsheets updated for members!
As we’re getting back into the swing of things, let’s check out the housing stats for the recently-completed month of August. Overall it’s the same story we’ve been seeing for quite some time: Sales are up and listings are way down from a year ago. Foreclosures are practically non-existent (which was the case even before the various mortgage forbearance programs went into place).
Here’s the snapshot of all the d ..read more