Case-Shiller: Prices Begin Falling Again as Stimulus Wears Off

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Keep in mind that all of the charts in this series of posts are based on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website (requires free registration). For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – November data is released in January).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Seattle area* as of November:

Fourteen of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between October and November (three more than October). Detroit, Washington, Miami, Tampa, Chicago, and New York all marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at Seattle’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

The low tier and high tier both increased slightly (0.4% and 0.3% respectively, while the middle tier was perfectly flat.

Here’s a look at the seasonally-adjusted month-to-month figures in Redfin’s markets, with annotations of the beginning and the original end of the homebuyer tax credit, so you can see that I’m not just making stuff up when I say that the effects of the stimulus are wearing off.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles still appear to be on the rise, but elsewhere in the country, the summer 2009 price boost seems to have run out of steam.

*[Case-Shiller defines Seattle as the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.]

Gordon Majack is the #1 Buyer’s Agent in December 2009 in King & Snohomish Counties

Our Seattle agents closed out 2009 with another outstanding month!

Of the 1,900+ buyers’ agents who closed a deal in King & Snohomish Counties, five of the top ten work at Redfin and Gordon Majack is #1 for December 2009:

*Allie also closed on a new construction home not listed in the MLS.

Six more of our Seattle-area agents closed deals in December:

*Cheryl also closed on a new construction home not listed in the MLS.

When you work with Redfin, you get great customer service while working with some of the most successful and most active agents in the region. Our agents know what’s going on in the market right now because they spend all of their time serving our clients: touring homes, writing offers and closing deals.

These numbers come from the NWMLS, which tracks real estate transactions in Washington state. We ranked buyers’ agents in King & Snohomish Counties first by number of purchases of single-family homes and condominiums in December, then by total dollar amount.

Our Clients Love Our Service

We survey every client and track every transaction in a central customer database. For the surveys we received in December from our clients in the Seattle area:

• 74 clients responded to our customer-satisfaction survey and posted a review online, up from 68 in November.
• 74 of those clients, or 100%, would recommend Redfin to a friend, up from 93% in November.

We ask customers to rate the likelihood that they would recommend Redfin to a friend on a 0-to-10 scale. Customers who rated 6 or higher count as people who would recommend Redfin to a friend. To learn more about how we survey our clients and calculate the customer ratings, check out our FAQ on agent reviews.

Ballard Real Estate Happy Hour on January 28th

Redfin’s Ballard team is hosting a happy hour at the Barking Dog Alehouse in Ballard from 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, January 28th.   We’ll talk about what’s happening in the Ballard real estate market, share some tips on how to find a bargain, and give some insight into negotiating in this market.

Come have a drink on us, talk local real estate and meet a few of our Ballard agents.   For planning purposes, please let us know if you can make it, but if you’re in the neighborhood feel free to just stop by.

Hope to see you there!

Biggest Discounts by City in November

Let’s check in on our stats to find out where buyers are currently getting the biggest discounts off asking price. If you are a potential buyer, this will help you to know which neighborhoods may be softer in terms of sale price discounts off list price, and help you know where to look for potential bargains.

In the charts below, we have taken all sales data from the month of November in the Seattle area and sorted it by city.

Methodology
First, we compiled a list of every sale that took place in the month, calculating each sale’s sale-to-list ratio (based on the final list price). Next, we simply take an average of every individual sale’s sale-to-list ratio to calculate an entire area’s sale-to-list ratio. Any sales that came in with a sale-to-list ratio above 150% or below 50% are excluded from the calculation, and areas with fewer than twenty sales are excluded from the top and bottom ten rankings. Interested readers may download the full data summary in Excel format (xls).

Here are the top ten areas with the largest overall discount:

The overall discount rose slightly from our last update (based on August sales), moving from 2.4% to 2.5%.

Here are the ten areas with the smallest discounts:

In the 27 areas we ranked, the median discount was 2.4%.

Is the area you’re shopping not on either the top 10 or bottom 10? No problem, just download the full rankings in Excel format and check out the appropriate “Full” sheet.

Of the 2,731 sales we tracked in the 1-month period, 562 (over 20%) homes sold for 5% or more off the asking price, while just 89 homes sold for 5% or more above the asking price.

Case-Shiller: Prices Mostly Flat as Tax Credit Neared Expiration

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Keep in mind that all of the charts in this series of posts are based on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website (requires free registration). For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – October data is released in December).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Seattle area* as of October:

Eleven of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between September and October (the same number as September). Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Las Vegas, Cleveland, Miami, Chicago, and Tampa all marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at Seattle’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

Seattle’s three tiers all rose slightly at a roughly even rates from September to October, with the high tier increasing 0.4%, the low tier going up 0.5%, and the middle tier rising 0.7%.

Here’s a look at the seasonally-adjusted month-to-month figures in Redfin’s markets (welcome Atlanta!), with annotations of the beginning and the original end of the homebuyer tax credit, so you can see that I’m not just making stuff up when I say that the effect of the tax credit on home prices appears to be waning.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

The excellent economics news site Calculated Risk posted a great roundup on Sunday of 2009’s various government programs intended to prop up home prices, and when each is currently allegedly going to end. With the housing credit expiring next spring, mortgage-backed securities (MBS) purchases ending in the first quarter, and tighter lending standards from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) on the way, home prices still may be poised to fall a bit further before all is said and done.

*[Case-Shiller defines Seattle as the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.]

Trevor Smith is the Top Buyers’ Agent in November

Our Seattle agents had another outstanding month in November!

Of the 2,100+ buyers’ agents who closed a deal in King & Snohomish Counties, five of the top seven work at Redfin and Trevor Smith is #1:

Six more of our Seattle-area agents closed deals in November:

When you work with Redfin, you get great customer service while working with some of the most successful and most active agents in the region. Our agents know what’s going on in the market right now because they spend all of their time serving our clients: touring homes, writing offers and closing deals.

These numbers come from the NWMLS, which tracks real estate transactions in Washington state. We ranked buyers’ agents in King & Snohomish Counties first by number of purchases of single-family homes and condominiums in November, then by total dollar amount. Here’s the spreadsheet we used with the agents’ rankings.

Our Clients Love Our Service

We survey every client and track every transaction in a central customer database. For the surveys we received in November from our clients in the Seattle area:

• 74 clients responded to our customer-satisfaction survey and posted a review online, up from 68 in October.
• 74 of those clients, or 100%, would recommend Redfin to a friend, up from 93% in October.

We ask customers to rate the likelihood that they would recommend Redfin to a friend on a 0-to-10 scale. Customers who rated 6 or higher count as people who would recommend Redfin to a friend. To learn more about how we survey our clients and calculate the customer ratings, check out our FAQ on agent reviews.

Seattle Magazine Names Three Redfin Agents 5-Star Professionals

This month, Seattle Magazine published a “Best of 2009″ issue on everything from the best iPhone apps to the top professionals in the Seattle area. We’re proud to announce that three Seattle Redfin agents, Trevor Smith (two-time winner!), Febe Cude & Cheryl McLaine were all named 2009 5-Star professionals.

Agents are nominated based on customer testimonials and we’d like to thank our clients for helping get three of our agents on this list. It’s not a big surprise since our Seattle team of agents has maintained a 97% customer satisfaction rate for 2009 while we continue to have the top agents in King & Snohomish counties. Congrats to the agents and a special thanks to our clients for the nominations. In full disclosure, you can read more about how the agents were selected.

Meet Trevor, Febe & Cheryl

	Trevor Smith Serving Ballard, Fremont, Queen Anne & Magnolia Homes Closed: 200+
	Febe Cude Serving Laurelhurst, Wedgwood, Ravenna & Wallingford Homes Closed: 100+
	Cheryl McLaine Serving Kirkland, Redmond, Bothell & Woodinville Homes Closed: 100+

November (belated) City/Neighborhood Price Reductions

Let’s have another look at which cities and towns have the most price reductions.

The following charts show the percent of MLS, FSBO or REO listings that were price-reduced at some point before leaving the market (either sold or removed unsold from the market) in the past 90 days (as of 11.16.2009). Cities/towns or neighborhoods in which the number of homes taken off the market was too small to provide believable estimates are excluded from ranking.

For those that are interested, I have uploaded the full data set in Excel format here. The downloadable Excel file also includes charts showing the top ten cities/towns/neighborhoods with the least reduced-price listings.

First up are the top ten cities with the most price-reduced listings:

Of the 136 cities/towns we ranked in the greater Seattle area this month, 91 had price-reduced ratios of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 52.3%.

Getting a little more granular, let’s look at the top ten neighborhoods for price reductions:

Of the 104 neighborhoods we ranked this month, 44 had a price-reduced ratio of fifty percent or more. The median price-reduced ratio was 47.5%.

As I was processing this data I noticed something interesting. In Redfin’s eastern US markets (New York, Boston, DC, and Chicago), median price-reduced ratios ranged from 43% to 55%. In the California markets (San Diego, LA, Orange County, Sacramento, and SF Bay), the median price-reduced ratios were much lower, ranging from 24% in Sacramento to 34% in Orange County. There seemed to be something of an east-west divide in the data… Except that Seattle ended up with the second-highest median ratio, coming in at 52%. Here’s a visual of how Seattle sticks out from its nearest geographical neighbors.

Not sure what it means, but I thought it was interesting.

Download the full spreadsheet to check where your neighborhood came in (assuming your neighborhood had enough sales to be ranked).

Case-Shiller: Effects of Tax Credit Appear to be Waning

It’s time for our monthly check-in of the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices (HPI). Keep in mind that all of the charts in this series of posts are based on the seasonally-adjusted data provided by S&P. For the full source data behind this post, plus non-seasonally adjusted data, hit the S&P/Case-Shiller website (requires free registration). For an explanation of how the Case-Shiller data is calculated, check out their methodology pdf. Also remember that the data released on the last Tuesday of a given month is for the period two months prior (i.e. – September data is released in November).

Here are the basic Case-Shiller stats for the Seattle area* as of September:

Eleven of the twenty metro areas tracked by Case-Shiller saw an increase in their respective seasonally-adjusted HPIs between August and September (down from sixteen in August). New York, Boston, Charlotte, Seattle, Dallas, Portland, Tampa, Las Vegas, and Cleveland all marked seasonally-adjusted drops month-to-month.

Here’s a look at Seattle’s latest tiered data, back through 2000:

All three tiers in Seattle declined in September, as whatever small effect the tax credit was having seems to have already worn off, even a good two months before the credit was originally set to expire.

Here’s a chart of Case-Shiller HPIs for all the markets that Redfin serves:

Here’s our peak decline chart, in which we line up the peak Case-Shiller HPI value for each of Redfin’s markets, so we can see how long each market has been declining, and how much it has dropped from the peak.

Here’s the flip side of the peak decline chart—a graph of just this year, indexed to January = 100%:

Seattle still seems to stand out quite a bit in that last chart. I guess we weren’t done declining, tax credit or not.

With the tax credit having been extended until the spring, and pretty much all the benefit having been squeezed from low rates and tax giveaways, it seems likely that we will see some price deterioration in the next few months as we head through winter. Beyond that is anybody’s guess.

*[Case-Shiller defines Seattle as the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA Metropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties.]

West Seattle Real Estate & Beer on Monday, November 30th

Redfin’s West Seattle team is hosting a happy hour at the Elliott Bay Brewing Company in The Junction from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. on Monday, November 30^th.   We’ll talk about what’s happening in the West Seattle real estate market, share some tips on how to find a bargain, and give some insight into negotiating in this market.

Come have a drink on us, talk local real estate and meet a few of our West Seattle agents.   For planning purposes, please let us know if you can make it, but if you’re in the neighborhood feel free to just stop by.

Hope to see you there!