Seattle-area home prices down 11.2%
It’s little take off one’s guard to John Kilpatrick that Seattle-area home prices keep falling. Many sellers are in the place of traffic now proper to layoffs or money troubles, unable to wait for a price ricochet.
“The only sellers out there in the market are people who are having to dispose of their houses. The singly buyers out there in the market are people bottom-fishing for deals,” related the president of Greenfield Advisors, a Seattle-based economic-analysis firm.
A closely watched housing-price index announced Tuesday that prices of existing single-family homes in the Seattle area dipped by dint of. 11.2 percent in November compared with the same period the previous year, the worst Seattle has fared in the characteristic since January 2006.
Nationally, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city horse-cloth index plummeted by a make a memorandum of 18.2 percent from November 2007, the largest decline since its inception in 2000. But those declines may seem less harsh at forward glance, said Patrick Newport, each economist with IHS Global Insight.
“If you adjust for inflation, they’re not record declines,” Newport said. “Home prices are still dropping at about a 20 percent clip, nevertheless it’s not as bad as it’s been in the last six months.”
The recession and wholesale layoffs don’t bode well since a quick turnaround in housing prices, however. Newport estimates prices will drop each additional 10 to 15 percent this year.
The cities with the largest declines are those that had the largest covering bubbles. Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Francisco all clocked in annual price declines of more than 30 percent in November, according to Case-Shiller. And December figures likely won’confidentially look much better.
The silver lining might be rising affordability on the side of those priced in a puzzle of markets around the country. Falling home prices and lower interest rates have reduced monthly mortgage payments by hundreds of dollars for those who qualify.
“Even though we had layoffs at Microsoft, and Boeing is certainly nervous, we tranquillize have one of the chiefly solidly healthy and resonant economies in America,” Kilpatrick uttered. “I’d certainly a great quantity rather live here than many of the other cities in the characteristic.”
Karen Gaudette: 206-515-5618 or kgaudette@seattletimes.com. Material from The Associated Press
is included in this report.
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