You’d think it’d get hard at this point to come up with shocking stats to describe the state of the Seattle-area housing market, but, you’d be wrong. The April S&P/Case-Shiller Index was released Tuesday and it tells the story of a Seattle market that doesn’t appear ready to slow down in the least.
The housing sector continues to turn in a strong price performance with the S&P/Case-Shiller National Index rising at a 5% or greater annual for six consecutive months. The home price increases reflect the low unemployment rate, low mortgage interest rates, and consumers’ generally positive outlook. One result is that an increasing number of cities have surpassed the high prices seen before the Great Recession. Currently, seven cities – Denver, Dallas, Portland OR, San Francisco, Seattle, Charlotte, and Boston – are setting new highs.
As for those new highs in Seattle, single-family house prices across King, Pierce and Snohomish counties are up 10.7 percent from April 2015 to April 2016, which is over double the national average (five percent). The only city with more growth? Our Pacific Northwest neighbor Portland (12.3 percent).
Seattle’s home prices didn’t rise quite as much as they did last month (2.4 percent) but the 2.1 percent in April was still good enough for No. 1 in the nation, ahead of Chicago (2.0 percent) and Minneapolis (1.9 percent).
All-told, if you wanted to buy a single-family house in the Seattle-area, you are looking at prices that are, on average, 53 percent higher than they were four years ago.
As Seattle Times notes, King County median house sale price is now up to $560,000, Snohomish County median price is $390,000, and Pierce County median price us up to $275,000.
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