Seattle Real Estate Price Trends: October 2006

Here's an overview of the current Seattle housing market. Next week we'll illustrate a handful of key Seattle zip codes to explore a little. First, our real-time market profile for the city as a whole:

The number of properties lowering their price has grown to 43%, which is comparable to San Jose. Single family homes in San Francisco are holding up significantly better, with only (!) 27% having lowered their prices.

Some other interesting tidbits about the homes for sale in Seattle:

• Despite the signs of market cooling noted above. Prices are not generally falling through the floor. In fact the median prices have hovered around a plateau for a full six months. We may be seeing the weak cyclical trend ("the burst") interacting with a typically strong seasonal market ("summer buying season"). The net effect is prices haven't moved. Watch as the winter comes on to see if convergent seasonal and cyclical weakness impacts prices more noticeably.
• Our Trend Indicators for the broad Seattle real estate market see plateaus in other market measurements as well, for example Days on Market has held steady.
• The highest priced properties (the top quartile) went through a 20% correction earlier in the summer but appear to have stabilized in the last few months, price-wise. The following chart, while a little boring, illustrates the key part of the market that's moving.

Seattle Homes for sale - Real estate price trends in four market segments. 90-day rolling averages.

Middling results to be sure. The housing market bears call look at these signs and call it "just the beginning of the housing market crash." The bulls (are there any real housing market bulls these days? Maybe what we have is "Bear" and "What, Me Worry?") read these signs as "less damage than expected."

Footnotes:

*sold and pulled off market

**properties currently on market that have been on earlier in the year under a different MLS ID. This stat is dropping precipitously since the Northwest MLS issued new rules about 6 weeks ago.

***properties on the market earlier in the year at a lower price.