A new housing sales price report ranks the Seattle-Tacoma area among the top-performing metropolitan areas nationwide in April, but Tacoma real estate brokers raised warnings about reading too much into those broad-brush numbers.
“We’ve hit the bottom and we’re climbing up the hill. But we’re yet seeing the kind of price appreciation we’d see in a healthy market,” said Tom Hume, a broker with Windermere Professional Partners.
Those nationwide statistics, published Tuesday by S&P Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, showed a bit of good news. Home prices in 20 of nation’s major metropolitan areas showed average price increases of 0.7 percent in April over March. Those prices were up over the previous month’s for the first time in eight months.
Among the metro areas ranked on the Case-Shiller Index, Washington, D.C, topped the list with a 3 percent sales price increase over March. San Francisco showed the second-highest increase with a 1.7 percent jump. Seattle and Atlanta tied for third at 1.6 percent.
Six of the 20 metropolitan areas in the survey, Charlotte, N.C., Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, Miami and Tampa, Fla., saw further price declines in April.
But if prices here rose in April, a local report shows they fell in May.
In March in Tacoma, the average sale was $175,517. The median price was $153,900. The median is the price at which an equal number of sales are less expensive than that number and more expensive.
In April, the Tacoma average was $182,371. The median was $165,000, according to figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.
May dropped down again. The average Tacoma sale in May was $168,073. The median was $143,500.
“So the average was up 3.9 percent, median was up 7.2 percent over April,” said Hume. “However, May shows us giving up those gains and more. And what we know about June so far is that it is slightly up from May. Fluctuation month to month is normal, especially with a small sample like this, but I think it does reflect that our market here in Tacoma, which had been recovering. It did suffer a setback this spring and it happened in May,” he said.
Figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service showed Pierce County median sales prices continued to decline in May over May of last year. Those statistics showed the median home sales in Pierce County in May of this year were $194,000, compared with $221,000 in May 2010. That’s a 12.22 percent decline.
In Thurston County, the decline wasn’t as steep. Median prices there fell 4.41 percent in May to $218,900 compared with a year earlier.
In Tacoma’s North End, real estate broker Al Morken said, median prices have declined from $229,950 in January to $198,250 in May.
“For a real recovery, we would need to see several months of increasing home prices large enough to shift the momentum to the positive side,” said David M. Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Indices. “In short, better news, but still a lot of questions and a long way to go.”
Morken, who provided real estate statistics to local brokers for several years, said the home sales prices can be deceptive because they don’t show the kinds of concessions, such as allowances for closing costs, home repairs and upgrades that some sellers give buyers to close deals. There stlll too many houses on the market compared with the number of eager buyers to move prices significantly upward, said Hume.
John Gillie: 253-597-8663 john.gillie@thenewstribune.com
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