Seattle Bubble Forum Archive

For the last year or so, I've been using my commute from Lake Hills to Microsoft as a sort of sampling of the area's housing market. It's been a pretty good indicator of the overall market IMO, so I'm curious to see how it plays out this spring.

The route is a roughly 3 mile commute along residential Bellevue and Redmond, primarily along 164th Ave and part of 40th St. I only count houses for sale or rent that are actually on the road itself, not down side streets, even if there's a sign on the main route pointing to it.

As of today (from memory) there's 3 houses for sale (one FSBO), and an additional one marked as sold recently. There are have been as many 9 for sale previously, in the summer of last year. There's also the new subdivision on 40th with three houses going up, but i'm not counting them at the moment.

I'll post updates here as things change.

House at the end of my street went up.

Total: 4 homes + 9 lots.

Was out of town for a week, and there were some slight changes while I was gone. One new sale sign has gone up, and while the rent sign cam down, another one went up. The subdivision hasn't had any new sales, but the houses are going up very fast. Hope they aren't shoddy.

For Sale: 5 (4 SFH, 1 Condo)
For Rent: 1
Building: 8

Looks like I posted a few hours too early. The house sitting at "sold" for months is now back on the market. I guess the deal fel through.

For what it's worth, about half this commute is in 98008.

For Sale: 6 (6 SFH)
For Rent: 1
Building: 8

I noticed on the way to the store that another house went up for sale. This one had an open house this week, which was odd because there had been no sign until the open house. Now the sign is up. This same house was up for sale last year but the sign came down without ever having said sold, and with no evidence of anyone living there all winter.

For Sale: 7 (All SFH)
For Rent: 1
Building: 8

That's only 2 shy of last year's peak, hit in late summer.