HAWAII! Andrea Healey is an Associate Broker at Oceanfront SIR, serving Greater Kauai. Caring, meticulous, goal-oriented, and outgoing, Andrea has made the most of island life and developed strong relationships across the community.
Throughout the years, we have befriended many quality real estate brokers around the country and other parts of the world. In our effort to always provide the best possible service to our clients, we have built professional relationships and friendships with the best of these brokers and touch base on a regular basis to discuss how our individual regions are changing while learning about new services and technologies they’ve implemented. This year, we will share a collection of articles co-written with some of these amazing professionals.
Data from the fourth quarter of 2018 is in and Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty has analyzed the numbers. Take a look at the latest housing market trends in Seattle for single-family homes and condominiums.
Having briefly subsided from September into October, residential prices in Seattle resumed their upward trek, with the index turning positive by 0.18% in November. The official report from Case Shiller noted that “Seattle, Las Vegas, and San Francisco reported the highest year-over-year gains among the 20 cities. In November, Seattle led the way with a 12.7% year-over-year price increase, followed by Las Vegas with a 10.6% increase, and San Francisco with a 9.1% increase.”
The in-city housing market in our Emerald City has a split personality. Buy or rent, the message is the same – it’s going to cost more and more to live here. This fact is reigniting the debate between renting and homeownership and developers are listening.
Downtown Seattle is a very robust rental market, which has welcomed more than 12,500 new construction units since 2011. Despite this massive increase in supply, economist Brian O’Connor says rents have still grown by more than 40-percent over this term due to an imbalance with supply and demand. According to Zumper, Seattle is now in the top ten most expensive rental markets in the nation with a median price of $1,800 per month (half are more, half are less) for one-bedroom apartments. Average rents of newer apartment towers downtown can demand $3.50 to $4.25 per square foot, per month. So a 600 sq. ft. one bedroom could easily cost a renter $2,100 to more than $2,500 per month. That kind of monthly payment could service a healthy mortgage. Recently, Zillow stated that 22-percent of Seattle’s renters can afford to buy. They have the incomes and credit scores to own, so why don’t they?
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Eager homebuyers rallied during the first half of 2016 increasing unit absorption and median home prices by 48% and 28%, respectively according to analysis of Northwest Multiple Listing Service data released as of June 30th. The typical condominium is selling in just over a month with a median home value of $575,000. However, a closer look reveals that 135 of the 381 condominium closings so far this year were in the INSIGNIA condominium tower, a new construction development (and one remaining developer-owned unit in the Four Seasons Private Residences) whereas there were effectively no new construction deliveries or closings during the same term in 2015. When removing this spike of higher-priced, new inventory in the overall resale market still expanded by 22% year-over-year but total resale closings actually decreased 5% with 246 homes in 2016 (including a few resales at INSIGNIA) against closings of 258 units in the first half of 2015.
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The West Seattle area of the city of Seattle includes the neighborhoods of Alki, Admiral, North Admiral, Belvedere, Fauntleroy, and Gatewood. Local media reports in 2015 indicated that West Seattle, especially its northern and western neighborhoods, have been a preferred target for homebuyers moving from California’s Bay Area. Chief Sealth High School in West Seattle is ranked among the top public high schools in the state. Although the area has been a seller’s market for years, the monthly supply tightened markedly in 2015, bottoming at 19 days in June. The average monthly supply was 1.8, from 1.7 in 2014 and about a month the previous year.
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The Queen Anne/Magnolia area of Seattle comprises these two areas as well as a western portion of South Lake Union, near Amazon’s campus. Magnolia is the site of Discovery Park and The Homes at Fort Lawton, a community of restored homes offered by Realogics Sotheby’s International Realty. This area includes The Center School, one of the top-rated public high schools in Washington. It also includes the Seattle waterfront northwest of Belltown, where F5 Networks’ headquarters are located.
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Central Seattle includes, among many others, the communities of Broadmoor, Capitol Hill, Denny Blaine, Madrona, and Washington Park. The Washington Park Arboretum is one of the world renown institutions in this area. Garfield High School, the state’s 12th ranked public high school is located here.29 There are over a dozen SEVP schools in this area, including the Northwest School just blocks from downtown, Seattle Preparatory School overlooking Portage Bay, Holy Names Academy in Stevens, and The Bush School on the north side of Harrison Ridge.30 Three of the nation’s leading hospitals are proximate—Virginia Mason, Harborview, and Swedish Medical Center—and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is at South Lake Union. Though not in this area, the Amazon campus is very close by.
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