Market Update, Trends

Seattle Rated 15th Highest City to Recover

A recent Forbes Magazine article rated Seattle area as the 15th in its list of cities to recover from the recession. The  factors  used included diversity of industries, unemployment rates, economic growth in the past year, and stable housing fundamentals.

Last week at the National Association of Realtors convention in San Diego, Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, predicted a 15% increase in sales and that prices will climb 4% for 2010. I hope he is right.   I am seeing some bottoming out of prices

for homes in traditionally strong Seattle neighborhoods, but also a lot of continued softness in prices of both condos and homes in outlying areas.

It’s interesting how much happy news is coming out in recent days. In fact there is so much that it seems a bit overblown.  It reminds me of how much exaggerated bad news was abut the economy was coming out a year ago. Perhaps the media had  so saturated the market  with bad news that the only news that they can sell  now is good news. Hopefully this time it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy too.