Seattle only major US city to see decline in housing prices
Aug 28, 2019, 12:08 PM
Housing can play a major role in capital gains taxes. (Photo: Stephen Brashear, Getty Images for Redfin)
(Photo: Stephen Brashear, Getty Images for Redfin)
While the price of buying a home in the U.S. continues to climb nationwide, Seattle stands alone as the only major city in the country to see a year-over-year decline in housing prices.
Report: Seattle housing market continues downward trajectory
The latest data comes courtesy of the S&P CoreLogic Case-Schiller home-price index. Its most recent report shows that Seattle experienced a decline for the price of a home for the second month in a row.
While Seattle dipped 1.3 percent between June of 2018 and 2019, the rest of the nation experienced a combined year-over-year growth of 3.1 percent. Moving forward, the report estimates that “current rates of change will generally be sustained barring an economic downturn.”
Data from Zillow paints an even fuller picture of just how much the Seattle housing market has cooled in 2019. At the peak of the most recent boom in mid-2018, the average value of a home in Seattle was $750,000. That’s since dropped to $711,000, marked by a 4.3 percent decline over the last year.
Zillow expects that downward spiral to continue well into the future, predicting that by July of 2020, home values in Seattle will be down around $688,000.
Meanwhile, Pierce County’s housing market is booming, seeing an increase in median home prices of over 6 percent between July of 2018 and 2019.
Pierce County becoming ‘darling’ of Puget Sound housing market
“The secret is out about Pierce County,” Allen Realtors President Mike Larson agreed in a recent news release. “You can buy twice the house for about half the price. You just have to be willing to deal with the traffic if you work north or south of here.”
