Bad Housing News
Seattle Real Estate | Gerhard Ade

Bad housing news? The sky is not falling.

Real Estate is one of the most frequent topics of the daily news. Naturally, I pay attention to it, so a story headlined “Housing collapse 2.0 continues…” caught my eye. I found the story’s statistics suspect and disagree with the notion that real estate will lead us into the next recession. This is not 2007 when mortgage loans were handed out like cheap candy. In the next recession, real estate will be a victim, not the cause.

Data is not the same as information.

To keep informed about the Seattle area real estate market, I follow and study the numbers reported by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service – NWMLS.  To that end, I have set up location and price-specific searches that are of interest to my clients. One of those reports showed a home that had been listed for $17,750,000 and sold, after only 65 days on the market for a mere $8,350,000. At first glance, this seemed to confirm the national news that luxury homes were sold at much-reduced prices.  That’s bad housing news. Upon closer examination, it not only proved that all real estate is local but that each transaction has its own story.