Seattle Housing Price Increases Slow
Seattle’s housing prices are still going up but have slowed each month for the past 19 months.
| Go to Home - Most Recent PostsIn addition to Seattle, Charlotte and Portland, only Atlanta and Dallas posted year-to-year price increases on S&P’s 20-city list, while all 20 declined from August to September. The 20-city composite dropped by 4.9 percent from the prior year and 0.9 percent from August.
S&P’s quarterly national index was down 1.7 percent from the second quarter and 4.5 percent from the third quarter of 2006. The quarterly decline was the largest in the index’s 21-year history and the yearly drop was the second consecutive record low.
“Consistent with prior 2007 reports, there is no real positive news in today’s data,” Robert Shiller, chief economist at MacroMarkets LLC and one of the indexes’ creators, said in a statement accompanying the numbers.
Shiller put the odds of a nationwide economic recession at “over 50 percent” as the economy contends with falling housing prices, spiking foreclosures and turmoil in financial markets.
Other economists have put the chance of recession at one in three. National Association of Realtors chief economist Lawrence Yun said at his organization’s annual conference in Las Vegas this month that the economy has strong fundamentals and this year’s housing market resembles the decent market of 2002.
But Shiller said the current housing situation is unlike anything that’s come before.
“We’re in the aftermath of the biggest housing boom in history, so how do we use historical data to judge the outcome?” he said. “We’re out of the range of the normal variation in the data and I take that as very significant.”