Is the Seattle housing market bubble-proof? That’s what a new analysis suggests. Business 2.0 Magazine says Seattle is one of five cities where the longer term housing trend is positive. The real estate market has had plenty of negative numbers as of late. Sales of single family homes are down for six straight months, falling 1.9 percent in September. Median home sale prices are down as well, the largest drop in nearly four decades. But apparently that’s not the case here. The magazine calls Seattle one of five bubble-proof markets. San Francisco, Boston, and New York are also on the list. The magazine says the “Fab Five” may suffer dramatic swings but long-term trends are strongly upward. “We’re in the middle of a job expansion here so businesses are hiring, there is demand for housing, so we’ve got that going and we also have the constraints on land, so we don’t have existing supply to meet demand,” said Suzanne Britsch, an analyst who tracks real estate trends. Business 2.0 says limits on available land in Seattle and the other cities is a big factor. But so are trends in household income.
Seattle’s strong job market, which includes well-paying tech sector positions with companies like Microsoft and Amazon, also skews housing prices. The magazine says people with more money are chasing fewer properties, helping inflate the market and put it in the bubble-proof class. The magazine also puts 10 cities under a banner of “where not to buy” because of economic conditions. None are in Washington State. A majority are in agricultural areas in California and the desert Southwest. The business magazine also says home prices appreciated in Seattle an average of 3.2 percent a year since 1949. That’s above the national average of 2.3 percent.
