Here’s a great article on the vacant condo situation in Seattle in general and Ballard specifically from The Stranger’s Dominic Holden: Nobody’s Home
“I think that there was some overanticipated demand that was probably not real,” says Matthew Gardner, a land-use economist and principal of real-estate analysis firm Gardner Johnson. He notes that, given the current economic climate, banks are reluctant to lend to homebuyers, slowing the residential market to a crawl.
On a recent Sunday afternoon, despite the buzz of pedestrian activity on the street, I startled sales representative Tamara Hahn at the Hjärta, a condo that began preselling units in December 2005, by opening the door to the quiet showroom. She extolled the building’s virtues—eight stories of steel construction and high energy-efficiency ratings. “Buyers have to have confidence in such a fear-based economy,” she said, noting that the building’s qualities make it exceptional. “They have to feel good about it.”
But it appears few feel that “good” about the Hjärta. Despite Hahn’s claim that the building is 40 percent occupied, online tax records from King County show that only 21 of the 79 units have sold. That is, almost three-quarters of the building sits empty a year after opening its doors. (Follow-up calls to the Hjärta sales office have gone unreturned.)
It’s difficult to get a handle on the precise number of empty condos across the city, since there is no single source of that data. You basically have to go building to building inspecting the county sales records, looking for sales. Also, this method only works with new construction or conversion projects, and doesn’t let us know which units were bought, but are owned by speculators that have never occupied them.
In short, the condo oversupply in Seattle is probably not as extreme as places like Miami, but it is significant and growing.