Home sales are in the tubes here, too.

Sales of existing homes fell further in Washington than in any other state in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to a report Thursday. […]

“I am not surprised that we have one of the weakest performances out there,” said Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University. “It’s largely a reflection of (the fact that) we began to decline much later, so our cycle is less mature, if you will, than some of the other parts of the country that have already taken their lumps.”

The Puget Sound region also set a record for home foreclosures in January, Seattle Bubble reports using nifty graphs:

3d9e/1234550869-foreclosures_in_ps.jpg

23 replies on “Not Immune”

  3. Seattle IS different from the crisis places, like Southern Cal, Georgia, Arizona, Florida. We’ve lost a couple of years of appreciation off our houses — they’re worth about what they were in 2006. Big fucking deal. If you’re not a speculator, you don’t care. The houses in some of those other places have lost HALF THEIR VALUE. See the difference?

  4. Wow…so assuming we hold our jobs for the next two years (crosses fingers)…we may actually be able to stop renting and actually live in a HOUSE in a walkable neighborhood in the city center?

  6. @3,

    People who need to move for work certainly care, but that’s the problem with the obsession with home ownership these days — few people are going to live in one place for three decades.

  7. @5, the claim where? And yes, we are immune to the cratering effect seen in some places. If you can’t see the fundamental difference between a market correction and a market collapse, you have something wrong with you.

  8. #3 that may be true, but it kind of sucks when your house is worth less then what you owe. And the market is probably going to keep “correcting” itself though the summer.

    Luckily I got my house for a song. Yar.

  9. People who buy houses only planning to live in them for three years shouldn’t buy houses. A house isn’t a certificate of deposit. If you move frequently, you should be renting.

    If you bought in the last three years and you’re slightly underwater, it’s both mild and temporary.

    This isn’t really the same thing at all as someone who bought a house at $450,000 that’s now worth $175,000 with vacant defaulted houses up and down the block and zero prospects of ever reversing the situation, which is what’s happening in parts of SoCal, Florida, and outer Atlanta.

  10. You obviously didn’t speak to many Realtors from 2007 to 2008. And we can obviously see differences between here and Las Vegas, but that relative comparison doesn’t matter to most homeowners here. Are you really that out of touch?

  11. If you want to take issue with my argument, you’re going to have to be more specific. Out of touch with what? What exactly are “most homeowners” thinking about? What were these realtors saying, and why should anyone care?

    PS: people who spell realtor with an initial capital are douchebags. Discuss.

  12. “If you bought in the last three years and you’re slightly underwater, it’s both mild and temporary.”

    Says you, Kreskin. Nobody knows for sure where the market will bottom out, or how long it will take to return to peak value.

  13. @10: Seattle is always a year (sometimes 2) behind the national curve. Housing prices didn’t start rising here as fast as other parts of the country, and likewise, prices haven’t hit bottom yet here as they already have in Fl and CA.

    So knowing that, you can assume our prices will bottom out soon, while nationwide the prices for homes will be going up slightly.

    Our unemployment is really just starting as well, where it has been much worse on the east coast for months. That is just how Seattle is.

  15. Yes, The realtor’s association have trademarked it, but it’s a word first. The realtors have been fighting this battle forever, but they are utterly full of shit. The people who think Realtor ™ should be capitalized are the kind of people who also capitalize Lawyer and Engineer, and they should be ignored.

    I repeat: Seattle house prices are NOTHING like the smoking ruins in some other places, and are not going to be. Those places lost 50% or more of their value VIRTUALLY OVERNIGHT. We are not any number of years behind that curve.

    It’s a recession; it’s not the end of the world. And I said “temporary”, which does not imply any particular date for recovery. It could be next month, or ten years from now. That doesn’t make us Florida.

    Look at your own street. Are 3/4 of the houses empty? No, they aren’t.

  17. @15 There’s a big difference in comparing Seattle to Florida. Most of those empty places you speak of were built by speculators and most of the housing built here was actually built to meet projected demand and not as investment vehicles. The problem in Pierce county is, I think, worse because those were primarily people who lacked financial education, something the American educational systems fails at as miserably as everything else it does, that bought houses they had no realistic way of affording. So, the foreclosures/notices of trustee sale are on houses that these people actually need to live in. The rental market won’t be able to absorb all of the coming foreclosures, trust me it will get much worse in Snohomish county and I think still worse in Pierce, once more and more ARM loans reset in the next few years. The only hope those people have is if their income level picks up and they improve their credit enough to refinance, which seems unlikely since many of those same people took those loans because of bad credit in the first place.

  18. wait — be nice to fnarf! he’s going to have enough trouble dealing with all the new trolling without the regulars giving him a hard time!

  20. In parts of Atlanta, in certain segments, they’re off by more than anywhere here. If you want someone to draw a block-by-block map, you’ll have to go elsewhere. If you can’t follow my very simple point, then I can’t help you either.

  21. Furthermore, understand this: if you can afford the mortgage you signed up for, and you’re not intending to sell anytime soon, and your neighborhood is stable, you DO NOT GIVE A SHIT what the market fluctuations are. That describes most homeowners in this area. If I lived in one of the new developments in Marysville, I’d be a little more worried.

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