Bellevue Real Estate » sales

Weekly Scorecard 3-29-10

George Thurtle — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:25:44 +0000

Sales are staying fairly steady but inventories appear to be creeping up. South Bellevue has gone from 308 homes to 366 homes. East Bellevue in February bottomed at 211 homes and now has 248 homes listed. West Bellevue went from a low 192 homes and is now at 210 homes. This is typical action for the spring where new inventory is often brought to the market. The sales are staying steady but as inventories go up the volumes should also gradually rise as a general trend through the end of May but as we have seen nothing has been typical about this market for the last two years.

Here is the spreadsheet: Weekly scorecard 3-29-10

Weekly Scorecard 12-28-09

George Thurtle — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:01:49 +0000

Here is the report for the Weekly Scorecard from the “Nothern International Office” of East Bellevue Real Estate. Overall the same trends continue declining inventories, soft pricing and homes priced at or below the market are seeing multiple offers and sale prices over the list price. The sales volume is good for this time of year. Sellers seem more willing to accept the market realities and list closer to where the buyers think the market is at. As a result we see increasing sales volumes, declining inventory and flat pricing. However it appears if the seller is willing to list at the market price a number of buyers are willing to make offers.

The big issue is to see what happens the first part of the year and how the new Washington State Foreclosure Laws will affect the amount of bank owned inventory.

Here is the link for the spreadsheet: Bellevue Weekly Scorecard 12-28-09

Weekly Scorecard 10-26-09

George Thurtle — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:35:20 +0000

It appears the overall inventory is marching back up. It is now 252 homes. Three weeks ago it bottomed at a little over 230 homes. However this is not a lot of homes for this market which can run over 300 homes but it looks like as our sales volume decreases due to increasing prices and seaonality factors that the inventory is starting to creep back up. Will probably keep heading higher until Q1 next year.

Closed sales this week were 7 homes. Not bad. The week previous had 10 sales but it appears overall sales volumes are slowing down a bit. Average per sq. ft. prices are drifting back to the $220 per sq. ft. and are down from last week’s $235 to $229 this week and overall the average home sale was price was back down to under $500K at $491,514 very typical numbers for East Bellevue. There appeared to be no bank owned or short sale homes in this batch of sales.

Like last week the pending sales volume was low at only 3 homes. The average per sq. ft. price was $219 per sq. ft. There was one short sale in this batch of homes. This is a home that had been pending forever; a short sale new construction home so that one is a little suspect. However the important part is not the specific homes but the overall trend line. If you remember in June we saw the market bounce happen when pending sales vome and per sq. ft. prices were higher than the previous week. Now we see a new trend of lower pending sales volume and per sq. ft. pending prices. Looks like we have had a good little bounce and we will level back out at our traditional numbers.

As I said last week I think we are in a “trading” range where volumes and prices will decline until they get at or under $220 per sq. ft. and then we will probably see sales volumes and sales pick up and move us over the $200 per sq. ft. number. Will probably keep trading around this number until we start seeing real growth in the overall economy.

Weekly Scorecard 10-5-09

George Thurtle — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:43:55 +0000

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.