Just a thought about Seattle housing

Median household income: $60,665 http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Research/Population_Demographics/Overview/default.asp

What I was surprised about before were the number of people who make over $100K in the Seattle area, we must have a lot of those people here, and we do: http://www.seattle.gov/economicdevelopment/pdf_files/CAI%20OED%20Indicators%20Dashboard%202011%20081511%20FINAL.pdf

As far as Schilling we all know a year doesn’t make a housing market, but Shiller was widely quoted http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-04-24/news/sns-rt-us-usa-housing-reboundbre83n0sk-20120424_1_housing-rebound-high-gas-prices-robert-shiller

“The Housing market is likely to remain weak and may take a generation or more to rebound, Yale economics professor Robert Shiller told Reuters Insider on Tuesday.” That was April 24th 2012.

What Shiller said in the interview you linked is we are down to normal levels without defining normal at all. The rest of his interview was pretty dismal. He also says we may well be in for a five to ten year decline in home prices.

It’s always easy to grab some statistic and try to make something out of it, but the facts are clear. We have weak employment, uncertainty in Europe, China is a disaster, over all weakness in energy, commodities, and stocks. We never got that inflation from massive government infusion, globally, so it looks like we will need some real economic expansion, in a time when we are winding down a couple of wars.

We’re stuck with some sticky economic troubles, that don’t look like they will be resolved, any time soon.

So, I don’t see taking on massive amounts of debt on expensive assets, like the family home, at cheap mortgage rates as a good thing to do for the family.

If you are making $70K, your mortgage should be $1944 which puts you at about $275K to $300K with a mortgage payment alone of about $1500.

What can a family buy for $275K to $300K? In reality you should be much lower than that because you will want to pay it off , because that is the only way to create equity.

So you can see that the Real Estate market place is kind of dominated by the over $100K crowd. How much inventory do we need for them when the rest of us are, “priced out forever?”

It’s simple math that the price for housing will need to correct, lower, for our Seattle area, and probably most urban centers. You want people to have, and own housing, for all the reasons that have been widely quoted for years.