Seattle Bubble wonders aloud if Seattle and Portland are “outliers”
I’m no prognosticator, but I do like reading others’ predictions. Seattle Bubble has a nice chart comparing the amount of upwards price movement during the boom against the amount of downward price movement in the recent, ehem, “soft” market. The takeaway:
This snapshot does appear to support the assertion that there is a good correlation between boom and busts cycles across markets -and that generally speaking, the more you go up, the more you go down. But there appear to be outliers versus the trend: Namely, Detroit on the down side, and Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and possibly New York on the up side. This is interesting to me because the relationship between up and down markets is usually cited as evidence that the Seattle market will remain relatively stable compared to other markets – when according to this view, we appear to be bucking the trend and perhaps poised for a fall. We are down 7% to date when the trend line suggests we should be off 15-20%.