Craziness

edited May 2007 in Seattle Real Estate
A house in my neighborhood recently sold for $700k and immediately went up for rent. It is around 1200 square feet. I do not understand these business decisions. It looks like the buyer owns two other properties in King County.

The previous owner bought it in 2005 for just over $400k.

Comments

  • Wow, that's close to $600/sqft.
    Where is this home located?
  • If I had to hazzard a guess into the mind of a flipper, buy now when you can still get a wacko loan, rent during the slow-down, then next year when EVERYONE says it's supposed to pick up (sales pace), sell for a huge profit, should be worth 1.4 mil. Greed is predictable.
  • It is in south Bellevue.
  • Alan wrote:
    It is in south Bellevue.

    Well there's your problem. We breed pink ponies here.
  • Out of curiosity, I decided to see how many of the sales in my neighborhood in the past year were investors.

    I pulled up a list on redfin and looked up each entry in the King County Parcel viewer. From the property report from each page, I went to the records search page for the property. On the deed or warranty deed for the appropriate sale I got the buyer's name in the grantee field. I then did a new search for that grantee. I checked the resulting records to make sure it looked like the same person (same spouse was a good hint). From there I counted the number of properties the person currently owns by purchase records without matching sales records. I may have some errors here, but I think the numbers are pretty accurate.

    Here is the "privacy protecting" data. The first field is the purchase month/year. The second number of properties the buyer owns today (including this purchase). I couldn't get one value because it was a very common Chinese name with well over a hundred records matching. A cursory inspection of the records told me they were different people.

    6/6 4
    7/6 2
    9/6 3
    9/6 1
    9/6 1
    9/6 ?
    12/6 3
    1/7 6
    3/7 2
    3/7 3
    3/7 3

    Notice the trend of single home buyers right at the beginning of the school year. I think I can assume the ? is a 1.

    The rest are investors! (although this may be their primary residence)

    That is a ratio of 8:3. The sample size is very small though. I wonder how well it reflects the area as a whole.

    Anyone want to repeat the experiment in their area (it is kind of tedious work)?
  • Nice work, Alan.

    What's the area?

    I might take a gander at the Cedar Park area if I find some time.
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