PI: Townhouse market slows
Good stuff - here's the link
Also featured on HBB
Also featured on HBB
Townhouse market slows
Price cuts out of proportion with other homes in area
The Seattle PI from Washington. "Jamie Goodwin knew it would be a tough time to sell her Central Area townhouse. 'I'm a real estate attorney, and I knew that the market was soft,' she said. That's why she set her asking price at what another townhouse in her development fetched a year earlier."
"Even so, agents weren't even looking at the listing online, said agent Erin Goodwin, Jamie's sister. 'We listed in October, and I think maybe there's 23 clicks.'"
"Sitting in a townhouse he was trying to sell last month, Real Estate agent Alex Eckardt said he'd seen a fair amount of traffic since listing the home about a month earlier, but no offers. 'Six months ago this would have sold in the first week,' he said."
"More and more, homes of all types in Seattle are chasing a buyer pool that has become smaller and more cautious over the past year. But real estate agents and sales statistics show that the slowdown in townhouse sales has brought price cuts out of proportion with the rest of the market."
"'What we are seeing is these huge price reductions, where a guy's asking $600,000 one week, then $550,000 the next week and $500,000 the week after that,' said agent Ryan Thompson."
"Greg Bartell, (an) agent who specializes in townhouses, says he has seen particular slowing since August. 'I think the most apparent thing is prices coming down,' he said. 'I've seen some come down $90,000 off the list" price.'"
"The sales totals have held up better than those for all single-family homes, but have come at the same time as builders have put many new homes onto the market. 'There's just so many,' said Susanne Stauffer, who is Erin Goodwin's partner. 'The market's kind of saturated with them.'"
"The number of lots created through the permit process primarily used for townhouses increased notably between 2004 and 2005, then more than doubled between 2005 and 2006, increasing such lots from 50 percent of all subdivisions to 66 percent."
"Builders rushed into the swelling townhouse market during the past few years, paying high land prices based on expectations of continued appreciation during construction, Bartell said. Smaller builders responsible for many of Seattle's new townhouse developments had unrealistic expectations, Thompson said."
"'We got caught up in this frenzy,' he said. 'Then, when the market began to settle out, their ability to carry these properties was limited due to limited financial resources, so they began dropping prices very quickly.'"
"And many of the new townhouses are nearly identical, making it hard for them to stand out when they hit the market, Thompson said. 'There was just nothing very special about (them) and the prices were super high. Those prices were first to stagnate.'"
Comments
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*yes I know these are a joke
I smell a business opportunity. Zestimates work on the hypothesis that if you take something illiquid, and put a smoothed graph of it's price online, people will assume you know what you're talking about.
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