Boom Two Different Takes on the Latest Seattle Housing Market Report
posted by on May 7 at 11:50 AM
There’s a new report out today on the Seattle-area housing market. What does the report mean?
From the Seattle Times:
King County home prices keep rising, bucking national trendFor the fourth month in a row, the price of King County houses has risen, reaching a median $465,000 in April, according to statistics released today by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.
From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Home prices remain steadyWestern Washington home prices continue to hold up better than those in much of the country, but the latest numbers leave room for interpretation.
…
The number of closed home sales in King County last month was down 4.2 percent from April 2006, while pending sales, which can be a better indicator of the latest activity, were down 5.4 percent and the number of homes on the market was up 45.1 percent. This fits with a general trend of slower price increases, with increasing inventory and fewer sales, since last summer.
Seems like they have opposing headlines on this topic every month. Just goes to show that you can use statistics to prove just about anything.
It is tough to figure out what means what, when both dailies rely on realtors for their data and analysis thereof. Dailies make a lot of their income from real estate ads, so they have little incentive to go outside that industry for perspective.
I feel like one of the articles might be excluding condos from their calculations ("houses" vs "homes") but I can't tell.
I think it means that, like most economic stories, it's too complicated to express in a headline (which is written by a different person than the article).
Realtor's associations send this articles and Times lackies just paraphrase.
Go to seattlebubble.com for a good analysis of what's actually going on.
Executive summary: the PI article is closer to the truth, but not quite pessimistic enough. The Times article is crack-smokin' nonsense.
In reality, sales are slowing drastically, and the "rising" home price is probably a statistical artifact.
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