Once again, same city, same day, two newspapers, two headlines.
From the Seattle Times: “Housing prices slide in this state, 42 others.”
And from the Seattle P-I: “Area home prices up 2.8% from year ago.”
My suggestion… if you’re looking to buy a house, read the Times. If you’re looking to sell a house, read the P-I.
If you’re looking to maintain your sanity, read neither.
The Piper
Surprise surprise, newspapers print headlines intended to capture your attention, but don’t necessarily reflect the content of the article. To be accurate both headlines would have read “House prices went up in some areas and went down in others” But that’s not very catchy is it.
@1 I agree. Living in a burrow that’s paid for is a better deal than either buying or selling. Moving is too much hassle and involves high transaction costs. (Whooshing sound of rabbit blowing dust off knuckles of front paw.)
Please note if you will, that both papers share the same want ads. So, in this situation, the JOA benefits both, because it would look even sillier for both articles to turn up side-by-side in one publication.
The name of the game, clearly, is that they want their readers to keep buying and selling homes, so the realtors will keep buying all those full-page ads.
The old line about lies, damned lies, and statistics comes to mind.
Here in South Seattle, prices on existing homes are solid. Nobody is selling particularly cheaply.
However, if you look at all the condos that have gone on the market, which cost less than single family homes (we’d hope), you’re probably seeing the average home value go down. Problem is, nobody lives in an average home.
The headlines don’t actually contradict each other. One speaks of home prices in the “area” and the other speaks about housing prices in “the state and 42 others.” Plus we don’t even know from the headline if the “declining prices” story tells us if it’s the average price that’s declining if we look at Washington and the other 42 states all in one bunch, or if the price is declining in Washington and each of the other 42 states.
That made me laugh. Thank you. I generally just lurk, and skim the local politics and wish I had time to care more. I like these short and sweet posts.
When it is stated that “prices are rising” here, they mean that the median home price in April 2008 is higher than it was in April 2007. It doesn’t really mean that prices are rising. In fact, since the peak of July ’07, prices have been flat or lower for every single month since then, comparing the same month from ’07 to ’08..
Since August of ’07, the median home price in the state is down about 6%. That’s not rising.