At The Risk of Sounding Like My Father: Vol. 1

I've been trying to decide how to discuss media coverage of our local market without sounding like my father carping on the liberal bias of practically every news outlet that ever existed... and I finally realized that I can't not sound like that, but hey, I am well into my 40s. So here you have the first installment of "At the Risk of Sounding Like My Father", likely a regular feature on this blog.

Today in his blog Seattle P-I real estate reporter Aubrey Cohen posts about a new nationwide survey on home prices, with the headline "Washington 31st for price appreciation", which of course doesn't sound very good (nor does it look very good on the map at left, pink indicating that prices are down a bit for the state, though not as bad as the red states (CA, NV and FL.) But in the very first sentence we learn that the Seattle metro's October prices were UP over 2% and that Seattle ranked NINTH in the country for appreciation, not thirty-first.

But that doesn't make an eye-grabbing, alarmist, sky-is-falling, let's-all-gawk headline, now does it?

I'll prattle on about this a lot more later, but the truth is that while the party may be over, we aren't headed for the hangovers being experienced in Miami, Las Vegas and parts of California where there was more speculative building and many more predatory lenders feeding on the hopes and desperation of people who really weren't in a position to buy a home.

Desirable, RIGHT-PRICED homes are still selling quickly in Seattle. When you do the homework behind many of the "reduced price" signs starting to pop up around town, you find the listings were overpriced to begin with, based on last year's frenzy, and not likely to have sold even then...