Oct. 30--The economic impact of Boeing's decision to build a second 787 assembly line in South Carolina will ripple out slowly, but one place that may feel it sooner than others is the Snohomish County real-estate market.

Boeing's announcement that it won't build the line in Everett was the latest bit of bad news for a county already hard hit by the slump in housing.

While most county observers said they expected the announcement, it still comes as "a pit in the stomach," said Deanna Sihon, vice president of consulting for New Home Trends, based in Mill Creek.

The county's new-home sales were already down. They totaled 1,748 for the 12 months ending in August, a sharp slide from a high of 3,148, recorded in the 12 months ending in August 2005.

"The question is really about perception. The jobs aren't going to go away in the short term, but people may be wondering if the sky is falling," Sihon said.

Bill Hurme, head of Team Builder John L. Scott, which markets new homes for developers, said Snohomish County's economy is much less diversified than King County's and still heavily dependent on Boeing jobs.

The news that several thousand future jobs will go to South Carolina, Hurme said, "will have a chilling effect" on Snohomish County development. "There's no way you can spin it as good news," Hurme said.

He said that Wednesday, out of dozens of pending sales, one homebuyer backed out of a purchase agreement.

On a regional basis, the longer-term employment implications are what worried economist Dick Conway.

Boeing's plan will make it that much harder for Washington to pull itself out of its jobs slump, he said.

"If the 3,800 jobs stayed here, that would be helpful to the economy and its recovery," Conway said. Without them, "the recovery will be even slower than it was going to be."

High-paying jobs such as those at Boeing support other jobs throughout the local economy -- a Boeing worker buys a new fridge, the fridge salesman buys a sandwich for lunch, the sandwich-maker renews her gym membership, and so on. The more people work in well-paying jobs, the more jobs are created further down the economic food chain.

Conway, who has studied Boeing's impact on the regional economy for decades, estimates that each Boeing job generates spending that supports 1.7 other local jobs -- one of the highest "multipliers" of any private-sector employer.

That means every job Boeing creates in South Carolina represents nearly three jobs that won't be created in Washington.