Weekly Scorecard 9-28-09
I was out of town last week and didn’t have access to a computer so I missed doing last week’s report so I was interested in seeing what this weeks’s trends would be. I was really surprised to see another BIG drop in inventory this time down to 243 homes. This amount of overall inventory is really low for a market that generally runs at about 300 homes. For the last week 9 homes sold, one was a waterfront that sold for $1,827,000; even without this waterfront there was a huge jump in the per sq. ft. sales price for the 8 remaining homes at $267 per sq. ft. This number had been stuck at $220 per sq. ft. for the last three months. If this trend of declining inventories and rising per sq. ft. prices continue then it could be sign of some underlying appreciation is beginning to occur. What makes this $267 per sq. ft. price number all the more interesting is that there is no new construction or other factors that skewes these numbers sometimes. The average home sale price was $467,731. This is a pretty typical average number for East Bellevue so the fact the per sq. ft. sales price was so high with the average home square footage at 1,857 could be an indication of some underlying upward pressure on pricing. Time will tell.
There were 7 pending home sales with one bank owned and one short sale. The pending sales had pretty typical numbers with average list price being $418,896 and the average per sq. ft. sales price being a more typical $229. As we have seen in the Distressed Property Report overall distressed property sales are making up fewer of the overall listings. It appears that as the distrssed property is worked through the system it is stabilizing prices. In addition there appear to be fewer sellers in the market because there are fewer “forced” sellers who do not want to sell at the lower price levels that homes appear to have stabilized at. The next month will be interesting to see what happens. The overall economy still stinks and the only good thing to be said is that the rate people are being laid off at is declining. This market appears to be headed to that no man’s land of declinging inventory coupled with soft demand.