A reader who wrote in earlier this month contacted me with a
There are SO FEW homes that are 1,500-1,700 square feet (about the square footage I think my family could live in comfortably) that are not split entries (my husband and I find them inefficiently laid out and not very amenable to changes to layout) for sale in the North Seattle/Shoreline area. Many are 3 bd 1 ba 1,100-1,300 square foot homes (a little too small for us, a growing family, I think) and many that are 2,000+ square foot homes, many of them split entries, a floor plan we would rather not buy. We are focusing on homes a mile or so away from I-5 just to make commuting to downtown Seattle easier. We both work there.
Is this because these houses are absolutely fewer in number? Is that square footage unique to a housing development time frame or type of house? Or is it because these are more livable and so people who might put them up for sale otherwise are not in a rush? Or is it for some other reason we haven’t understood?
I guess knowing why would make this house hunt a little less painful. Or at least knowing how rare a house this size is would make it clear whether we (I) should even try to find it.
Also, where the heck are the new listings? Is there a depression in listings around holidays? Do people wait until the kids are out of school to list? After waiting almost 10 years to buy, it’s irritating that I have so little choice.
First let’s try to address the specific question about 1,500 to 1,700 square foot homes. Here’s a trick on Redfin that can help you get a sense for how common a certain type of house is in general. In this example I’ll be searching in Shoreline, but you can do the same thing anywhere. First, to get the total number of homes that have sold in the last twenty years or so, un-check the various listing boxes in the search options dropdown and just check “Sale Records,” then choose “All” in the dropdown. For Shoreline I get 11,400 total single-family sales.
Next, set your square footage and beds/baths parameters. When I choose a minimum of 3 bedrooms, 1.25+ bathrooms, and 1,500 to 1,750 square feet, I get 1,198 results—10.5% of the total.
There are currently just 115 active single-fmaily listings in Shoreline, and just seven that match the above criteria (6% of the total), and two of those are split-entry. Over the last three months, 158 houses have sold in Shoreline, and 12 of them (7.6%) have fit your criteria.
So relatively speaking, the type of home you’re looking for does appear to be less common on the market today as it has been in the past. I would venture to guess that this is probably due to a combination of factors. Primarily I would suspect that many of these homes were bought during the bubble by first-time buyers who believed the lie that they should stretch their budget to get into a home before they were priced out forever. Now that the bubble has burst, they’re stuck in these homes. They can afford to keep making the mortgage payment, so they haven’t gone into foreclosure, but they don’t have enough room in their budget to build any additional savings that might allow them to make a down payment on a “move-up” house.
As for the second part of your question, “where the heck are the new listings?” I’ve been asking that since the start of the year. This year has been the worst on record for new listings. I think there are just a lot of potential sellers that are “stuck,” and many of those that could afford to sell are holding off, thinking that “the bottom” means that things will be better for them next year (they won’t).
What about the rest of you? Do you have any insight into the medium-sized homes that this reader is searching for?
Full disclosure: The Tim is employed by Redfin.