Facebook
X
Pinterest
Copy Link
After a long holiday weekend I prepare for the week(s) ahead. Topics on my mind are the headlines around local tech companies, layoffs and real estate. Catching up on my reading this morning led my to Windermere broker Sol Villarreal‘s Civic Minute (the best Sunday reading in town). I’ve taken two excerpts below to amplify headlines and commentary from Sol – a very thoughtful guy who cares deeply about our region. Ps, if you’d like Sol’s Civic Minute to hit your mailbox each Sunday morning too – ping him, he’d be happy to add you: sol@windermere.com
Local tech companies continued to announce layoffs last week, while the state’s most recent unemployment data from October showed other industries adding jobs and the statewide unemployment rate remaining flat at 3.8%. For perspective, the roughly 18,000 planned tech layoffs that have been announced so far (only 5,900 of which showed up in the October unemployment data) represent just under 4% of the state’s tech workforce, and Amazon’s 10,000 layoffs will represent just 1% of the company’s total employees and 3% of its corporate employees; during the dot-com bust in the early 2000s, the tech sector lost around 10.5% of its jobs. [Seattle Times, GeekWire]
Gene Balk, (aka, Seattle Times FYI Guy) looked at the demographic and geographic distribution of tech workers in King County and put together a great countywide map showing the concentration of tech workers in each census tract. The map very clearly shows that aside from the area right around Amazon’s South Lake Union campus there are very few census tracts in the city in which tech workers make up more than 5-10% of the total population of employees, whereas the Eastside has a large number of census tracts in which 25-50% of employees work for tech companies. This likely helps to explain at least part of the huge divergence between home prices in Seattle and the Eastside in the last two years (before which they largely moved in the same directions at the same time), which saw home price growth on the Eastside eclipse home price growth in Seattle last year but then decline in the last 6 months at a much steeper rate, tracking well with the overall explosion in profits, stock prices etc. in the tech industry last year followed by the outsized impact on the tech sector of rising interest rates and a general stock market decline this year. Seattle’s home price growth, while not as strong last year as the Eastside’s, has been much steadier overall and as of last month is still at +20.3% year to date, vs. -10.9% year to date for the Eastside, likely owing in part to the fact that our real estate sector is less heavily dependent on tech workers than the Eastside’s. [Seattle Times]
Back to the offices I go tomorrow with a strong year-end wrap and planning focus for a New Year. I hope you each found pause and THANKS within Thanksgiving last week. Let all carry us thru year-end together.
– Laura
Ps, a refresher from the NWMLS below around TOMK status and Listing Agreements Expiring at end of year…
Taking Listings TOMK for the Holidays or Listing Agreement Expiring at the End of the Year?
Please Complete & Send Form 19 to NWMLS
Does your seller want to take their property off the market for the holidays?
If the seller would like to take their property temporarily off the market (TOMK) for the holidays:
- Please complete Form 19 (Status Change Input Sheet) with the seller. Note that a listing must be in the TOMK status for at least seven (7) days and may not be TOMK for more than forty-five (45) days.
Is your listing agreement expiring at the end of the year?
If your listing agreement will expire on December 31st, please remember to check with the seller and decide if they would like to extend the expiration date:
- To extend the expiration date while still Active, Contingent, Pending (all types) or TOMK, please complete Form 19 (Status Change Input Sheet) with the seller.
