Seattle Real Estate Market Trends

The Seattle area's real estate market showed signs of stabilization in September, according to new statistics released Monday.  Especially in the critical market for single-family houses in the four-county central Puget Sound area, said Glenn E. Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Policy Research at Washington State University.

Home listings increased 4.9 percent from a year earlier and 1.5 percent from the prior month in Seattle; countywide listings rose 6.2 percent from a year earlier and dipped 2.8 percent from August.

The main reason for the market stabilization in year-to-year numbers is the mortgage crunch hit the Seattle & Redmond real estate area hard in August 2007, when the region already had an increasing number of homes chasing a shrinking pool of buyers. That crunch showed first in the data from September 2007.

The median sale price fell last month by 8.3 percent to $295,000 compared with September 2007 and by 3.7 percent to $380,315 in King County.
Total active listings at the end of September were 10,889, down by about 1,500 or about 12 percent from a year earlier.

Crellin said the most significant figures he saw in the report were the declines in sales that closed in the central Puget Sound area - 16 percent in King County, 4 percent in Pierce County, 30 percent in Snohomish County and 14 percent in Kitsap County. Overall sales figures also include agreements that await financing.

The statistics show more sales are taking longer to close, reflecting delays in obtaining financing because of the credit squeeze nationally, he said.

"I'm not saying that they're not going to close, they're just taking longer," he said.
The areas previous real estate bubble had too many sellers and not enough buyers, so the trend is "ultimately good news for the market generally," Crellin said.Now may be the time to find the low hanging fruit and step back into the real estate market.  Talk to a Redmond real estate Agent and receive your Redmond real estate

Sellers are less aggressive in trying to cash in at a profit, "taking a more wait-and-see attitude," he said. "I think that's healthy."