The Seattle area has notched its sixth-straight month as the hottest real estate market in the country, as prices climb even faster heading into the peak buying season.
The typical single-family house locally cost 12.2% more in February than a year ago, the biggest jump in three years, according to the monthly Case-Shiller housing price index, released Tuesday.
Greater Seattle had the biggest price hike of any metro area in the country. Nationally, home prices jumped 5.8%, a 32-month high, and yet local home values grew more than twice as fast as that.
There are no signs local home prices are slowing — just the opposite. Compared to just a month prior, Seattle-area home costs grew 1.9%, which was by far the biggest in the country, and about eight times the national average.
The report looks similar to months past, with Portland again as the second-hottest market, though Dallas has overtaken Denver for the third spot.
A separate study this week by local real estate site Estately broke down home costs in a new way, comparing sales prices for homes based on which decade they were built.
As you might expect, new homes were the priciest, with single-family houses sprouting up this decade selling for an average of $845,000 in Seattle.
But that doesn't mean old homes offer any great deals.
Seattle houses built before 1910 now sell for an average of $725,000, while houses from the 1920s and 1930s command about $700,000.
By comparison, homes built between 1940 and 1980 cost closer to $610,000, and those that went up in the '80s and '90s cost about $665,000 on average.
The trend generally holds true even after controlling for size of the home. And the results were similar for condo sales, with new and old condos selling for the highest prices and middle-aged condos offering the cheapest deals.
So why are timeworn homes so expensive?
For starters, areas in Seattle with old houses often tend to be in more desirable neighborhoods with higher home values, like Queen Anne and Capitol Hill, while homes farther from downtown, in generally cheaper areas, were built later, said Estately CEO Galen Ward.
Many of the oldest homes have been remodeled and modernized at some point, raising their value, while homes built in the second half of the century are more likely to be in their original condition, Ward said.
And there are relatively few derelict houses rotting along city streets when there's so much money to be made by replacing them with shiny new homes.
"We've sustained enough booms that the tiny, run-down old homes have long since been torn down," said Ward. "The remainder are the survivors — they're the well-built, well-maintained ones."
Seattle sees an average of one home torn down per day, often to be replaced with a larger, much more expensive house. But in some cases, the torn-down homes are replaced with multiple, smaller town homes that add to the city's choked housing supply.
Looking at price increases, there wasn't much of a pattern for new versus old homes.
Adjusting for home size, prices have grown the fastest in the last year for homes built in the 1910s and 1960s (up 15% to 17%), and the slowest for houses from the 1990s, 1930s and 1900s (up nearly 11%), according to Estately.
Estately has crunched the numbers only for Seattle, so it's unclear how the breakdown of home prices by age compares to suburbs or other big U.S. cities.
