February 2009 Seattle Condo Market Stats

So the February 2009 numbers are in.  If you were hoping to find encouraging news, maybe March will look better.  I find year over year comparisons to be less useful these days.  We all know the year-over-year numbers are not looking good.  We can of course compare February YOY numbers to January YOY numbers (and we'll do that).  

Nevertheless, month to previous month numbers are probably the most useful these days.  Normally, you'd be worried about seasonality but in this economy, any positive movement from month to month would be encouraging.  Too bad that didn't happen in February.

Here it is.

February 2009 versus January 2009

• Closed Sales:  Down 16%  
• Median Prices: Down 18%
• Pending Sales: Down 7%  

Feburary 2009 YOY versus January 2009 YOY  

• Closed Sales:   -26% in January versus down -45% in February  
• Median Prices: +10% in January versus down -13% in February  
• Pending Sales:  -20% in January versus down -39% in February 

So is now the time to panic?  Not necessarily.  We all know it's been tough out there and it could be January had some innaugural optimism while February's Dow 1,000 point dow drop and other depressing economic news led people to look but not buy just yet.  Another super optimistic interpretation I heard about the economy in general was that the more things go down, the closer we are to finding the bottom.