Weekly Scorecard 10-5-09
The big news is that the inventory in East Bellevue continues to drop. It is now at 234 homes it hasn’t been this low in years. Traditionally this has been a 300 home market. It appears that a lot of sellers are taking their home off of the market because they are not able to get their desired price and will probably try again next year. In the past this trend was offset by increasing amounts of distressed inventory filling the void but as we have seen in the “Distressed Inventory Report” those numbers are headed down. Now distressed inventory comprises less than 5% of the market in November of 2008 it was almost 30% of the market.
A whopping 15 homes sold this week and of those 4 were waterfront homes. Only one was a bank owned home. The average per sq. ft. sales price was pretty low at $212 per sq. ft. The week before we saw a bonce off of the prevailing $220 per sq. ft. but that did not happen this week. The number of pendings was also larger than usual at 10 so it appears inventory continues to move out the door. There were two new construction sales and the average per sq. ft. sales price was $285 per sq. ft. We will see what the closed prices are but it appears that in the next month the average per sq. ft. sales price should continue to move up given the trend of the pendings.
Falling inventories is the big news. At some time with less distressed inventory and falling overall inventories there should be some upward pressure on pricing. The Altos graphs show pricing recovery for all zip codes except 98008. For some reason this zip code has had the most distressed inventory and also continues to experience some downward pressure on pricing.
Good news for the East Bellevue market. Hopefully the inventory numbers will stay low for the winter and we’ll have a strong spring.