Seattle Bubble

News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.

Seattle Bubble - News & discussion about real estate & the housing bubble in the Seattle area.
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Action Call to Seattle Bubble Readers: Condo Sales Status Project

By The Tim on March 20th, 2009 at 11:15 AM · 93 Comments

So just how many unsold condos is Seattle sitting on, anyway? As I mentioned in a post on Wednesday, figuring out just how much unsold condo inventory exists is a daunting task, requiring many hours spent with the public parcel records.

However, the task could be far less intimidating if we split it up. Here’s what I propose we do to get a more complete picture of the local condo inventory: Each reader (that’s you) spends just a few minutes with the King County Parcel Viewer pulling up the records for the nearest condo project to your home or work (both new construction and conversions). Then post the results here, I can compile all the records into a single spreadsheet that will then be freely available to everyone.

Here’s a step-by-step on how to get the data we’re looking for:

  1. Head over to the King County Parcel Viewer
  2. Pull up the parcel report:
    • If you know the address of the condo building, click “Search by address” then enter the building number and street.
    • If you don’t know the specific address, use the map to zoom in to the general neighborhood, then click the “identify” tool to pull up details on each potential lot.
    • Once you have found the right lot, click the “Get Property Report” link in the lower-left.
  3. Click the text “Units in this condominium complex” to expand a list of all the units in the building.
  4. Units that are unsold will list the developer (usually an LLC) in the “Taxpayer” column.
  5. Post the link to the property report here (or here), along with the name of the complex, its address, and a summary of total units and the number of units sold.

Examples:

Queen’s Court
124 WARREN AVE N 98109
http://www5.kingcounty.gov/kcgisreports/property_report.aspx?PIN=7015800000
34 units, 14 sold

Pittsburgh
117 JOHN ST 98109
http://www5.kingcounty.gov/kcgisreports/property_report.aspx?PIN=6815500000
31 units, 17 sold

So what do you say? If we all put in a little bit of effort, I think we can get a pretty good picture of the overall situation. One caveat is that this method will only work on condo buildings that are fully completed. In-progress construction will not necessarily have the individual units listed in the parcel report, and this method does not give us any information about “pre-sales,” which doesn’t really matter much anyway since so many pre-sale buyers are now forfeiting their earnest money and backing out of deals (see this ongoing comment thread re: Olive8)

I have also created a forum thread for posting results, so that we can continue to easily add to the project even after this post has moved off the front page of the blog. Feel free to post results in either location.

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