Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin.
Last night Redfin released their August market data. Here’s an excerpt from the narrative:
Our agents are reporting a steady stream of low-ball offers hitting sellers across the board. “Low-ball offers are rolling off the tongue of touring clients,” says Kenny Whiteside, a Redfin field agent. … Kenny is quick to point out that these offers were rarely if ever accepted by the seller.
By now, we’ve all heard (over & over & over) how insulting a low-ball offer is to a seller, but one thing we haven’t heard is how these low-ball offers are actually helping the seller. Lori Bakken, a Redfin Real Estate Agent in Tukwila, Kent and Auburn says, “Sellers aren’t desperate enough to accept these low-ball offers, but it is helping agents set realistic expectations in regards to pricing. It shows the seller that perhaps they priced their home too high straight out of the gate.” The trends of list prices falling faster than sale prices and sale-to-list ratios increasing slightly would seem to validate this observation.
You can download the full spreadsheet from Redfin here, and as usual, I’m going to map them here.
In the map below each zip code with enough sales in August is shown as a dot, with the size of the dot determined by the number of sales in that zip code in August. Each dot is color-coded based on whichever measure you select below the map. You can view the month-over-month or year-over-year changes in inventory, sales, median prices, or median prices per square foot. I’ve also added a county selector so you can narrow or expand the view to your liking.
Some of the more rural parts of east King County, as well as south King and a good part of Pierce saw increased sales month-to-month, but sales continued to fall most everywhere else last month, both year-over-year and month-over-month.
Inventory was flat to down month-to-month across most of the Puget Sound, but up 10-20% over a year ago through much of King County. Meanwhile, the size-adjusted median price ($/sqft) continued to fall in most places.
98109 (E. Queen Anne, SLU), 98039 (Medina), and 98055 (S. Renton) all turned in double-digit increases in size-adjusted median prices, but with fewer than a dozen sales each, I wouldn’t draw many broad conclusions based on this month’s data in those areas.
Anything stand out to you about your neighborhood in this month’s data?