In this brief post we want to share a chart we've made showing the real estate price trends for pre-existing / resale homes sold in Clark County Washington. The underlying data employed comes from the Regional Multiple Listing Service (RMLS); and goes back to 2009; charting the 3-month rolling average for prices in the County, and for the larger cities of Camas, Battle Ground and Vancouver.
To "highlight" the "bubble" we've manually created two straight black-lines (each with an arrow). The starting point for the base-line (longer, lesser-slope) is January 2012, which is approximately the bottom for the 2008 - 2009 crash; and beginning of the latest up-trend in home sales prices. We next add in a shorter black line that reasonably captures the price-increase-slope of the 2020 to 2022 strong run-up in prices.
These straight-lines that were added in, were then matched up with the Blue Price Trend line for the County average, showing clearly enough that home sales prices did indeed bubble; and for at least 6 months now have been on the "correction" side of the Peak.
How Big was the bubble? - is an interesting question that this chart may provide an approximate answer. When we stay on the longer-term straight line up to about May-June 2022; we would expect the County average home sales price to be about $490,000. At that same the recorded actual average sales price was $614,754. Thus, it appears the bubble caused prices to peak approximately $125,000 higher, on average, than indicated by the baseline-trend. For this market, that is a deviation of at least 25% which in our opinion, justifies the Bubble description.
In an upcoming post we'll put up another chart that shows how one major player in the real estate market likely contributed to most of the impetus behind this bubble.
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PS - if you'd like to see the latest Market Action Report published by RMLS for SW Washington (Includes: Clark County, Vancouver WA, Cowlitz County and Skamania County), here's our link: SW Washington Real Estate Market Action Report.
Note: as with all real estate statistics we use, the data and reports prepared are deemed reliable but not guaranteed .
Please contact us by phone or e-mail if you'd like us to help you with your home sales or buying needs in this local market.
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