The week after the Super Bowl is the traditional kickoff of the home-selling season, and after three down years for Seattle’s real estate market, sellers hope that prices have hit bottom. But Valentine’s Day morning dawned with a most unromantic missive from the New York Times, an article titled “Housing Market Looks Sickest in Cities That Once Seemed Immune” that focuses on Seattle.
The article says the Seattle market is down about 31 percent from its mid-2007 peak and, according to housing site Zillow’s chief economist Stan Humphries, still has as much as 10 percent to fall. Humphries estimates the rest of the country will drop a further 5 to 7 percent.
The gloomy news may have you wondering if Wallingford has been as affected by the housing downturn as the rest of Seattle. Recently we’d asked Wallingford and Green Lake real estate specialists Kris Murphy and Daniela Dombrowski of The Murphy & Dombrowski Group to run the numbers, and the picture is cheerier here for certain types of real estate than in other parts of Seattle and the region.
Wallingford neighborhood profile for single-family homes and townhouses (information provided by the Talon Group).
“We see a stabilization of prices and even a slight but steady upward trend, with the average sale price between 2009 and 2010 having increased from $565,953 to $566,482,” Dombrowski told us. “Overall, average prices in Wallingford are only about 11% lower than at the peak of 2007.”
Dombrowski said that current prices in our area are approximately at 2005-06 levels. “Overall Wallingford and other close-in Seattle communities have fared relatively well during the downturn,” she said. “But all neighborhoods have been affected to some degree over the last couple of years by the impact of short sales, foreclosures, bankruptcy sales and the glut of bank-owned properties, which continue to have the effect of lowering average sale prices.”
Even Dombrowski was surprised that Wallingford has been so resilient, according to sales data. Anecdotally, she would have put the neighborhood’s drop at 10-20%, she said. She added that the condo and luxury markets have suffered steeper declines than single-family homes.
We requested data from Aurora to I-5 and up to N. 55th St. Typically realtors call areas above N. 50th “Green Lake.”
Murphy and Dombrowski partially attribute Wallingford’s relative stability to what they term the “John Stanford effect.” Many families, they say, want to move into Wallingford so their children can attend the acclaimed school. Dombrowski said they’ve had clients wait for years for the right house in the JSIS area. As evidence of the John Stanford effect, the pair points out that Green Lake’s home prices have fallen 18% since 2007, as they noted on our sister site My Green Lake.
You can also hear more about Dombrowski’s take on the local real estate market in a KIRO radio interview from last week.
Is there anything out there about the Harvard – Belmont area? What's happening there?
The data would be far more useful if they'd been normalized per square foot, had listed median price as well as the average, and had made some effort to track the composition of the homes in each month's final sales mix.
Otherwise, it's impossible to tell if we're looking at a market that's shifted to an equilibrium where tougher lending standards are limiting sales to affluent households who are buying larger, more expensive homes.
Surely people who are paid to parse data for a living can come up with a more robust dataset than this.