Seattle Real Estate Market is Stabilizing
Thursday, October 30th, 2008The Seattle area’s real estate market showed signs of stabilization in September, according to new statistics released Monday. Especially in the critical market for single-family houses in the four-county central Puget Sound area, said Glenn E. Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Policy Research at Washington State University.
Sales of houses and condominiums in those counties rose nearly 4.1 percent in September compared with the same month in 2007, and nearly 4.2 percent in King County alone. The last monthly increase for the region was 4.8 percent in February 2007.
The main reason for the stabilization in year-to-year numbers is the mortgage crunch hit the Seattle & Redmond real estate area hard in August 2007, when the region already had an increasing number of homes chasing a shrinking pool of buyers. That crunch showed first in the data from September 2007.
The median sale price fell last month by 8.3 percent to $295,000 overall compared with September 2007 and by 3.7 percent to $380,315 in King County.
Total active listings at the end of September were 10,889, down by about 1,500 or about 12 percent from a year earlier.
