Monday NW Seattle Real Estate Market Update 📅April 27th, 2020
This week we discuss interesting figures that we’ve seen from Windermere’s Real Time Stats.
We mention Matthew Garner’s “Mondays with Matthew” from today, and how he compares 2020 to 2007.
(you can watch that here -> https://youtu.be/ZWR4wJ7y73Q)
We go over the changes in the housing numbers over the past week in NW Seattle, and lastly, we chat a bit about our “new normal” as real estate agents in today’s world.​
We are on week seven of our monthly, our weekly Monday update.
So, Windemere, and when I say Windemere, I’m really just talking about the in-city offices, we do something that’s called real-time stats. We let our Windemere company know after our closing, if there was multiple offers, and just a little bit about the transaction. So April just ended for the real-time stats and what was really interesting is that almost 50% of the transactions had multiple offers. 60% of those, had one to two offers. It was really just a small percentage that had three or more additional offers on the house.
Another thing that I was watching this morning, so I don’t know how many people are familiar with Matthew Gardner, but he is the economist for Windemere and he is super interesting and of course he’s British so I love his voice.
So he has his Mondays with Matthew. He was actually comparing the 2007 meltdown versus what’s going on now, because people keep asking are we heading for that housing crisis again. So he went back and compared the numbers from 2007 to where we were in February 2020. The real estate market was so much healthier than where we were in 2007. So back before the housing crunch in 2007, nearly 15% of homeowners had less than 10% equity. That’s actually quite a bit. Whereas in February 2020, that number was like 6.6%, so less than half had 10%. The amount of equity that people have in their homes right now is really high. At the end of 2019, almost 27% of mortgage holders out there had at least 50% equity in their house. And he didn’t have the figures from 2007, so that would be kind of really interesting to see where we were in 2007 versus now, because interest rates have been just so great compared to where they were in 2007 and 2008.
It actually takes less income now to make those purchases. The income to mortgage needed now is like 20% or like a little over 20% and back in 2007, it was like 31%, so big difference. Obviously if COVID hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t even be talking about any type of housing issues or anything.
Last week in Northwest Seattle, there were 160 homes for sale and that’s the same number there is this week. New listings this week, there were 31 new listings in Northwest Seattle, slightly less than last week’s number of 35. Pending sales, homes that went under contract, those were up three to 25. Pending homes going pending inspection was down from 15 to 11. Closed homes up, homes that sold, went from 27 last week to 35 this week and then homes going temporarily off the market, that went from two to one. That number’s usually always pretty low. And then overall in Seattle, I’ll just touch on that last week there were 758 homes for sale and this week there were 754.
We never expected the housing market to continue to be this strong this far into the pandemic that we’re having. We are still working with clients. It’s not quite as busy as it was, but it feels like we’re still in kinda normal except for working from home.
Yeah, it’s a new normal. We just have to do things differently and hey, we work around it.
If you have any real estate related questions, you can call us, you can text us, you can email us.
And it doesn’t even have to be real estate related. If you wanna chit-chat. Give us a ring however you wanna communicate, we’re always here for you guys and we appreciate it.
Yeah, we just hope everybody’s well.
Thank you.
We understand that it is a confusing time right now. Each Monday, we will be sending out an update based on our experience over the past week to give you the NW Seattle Real Estate Market’s “Temperature”. We are getting real time updates from our Lender each week as well. We want to make sure that you are as informed as we are. Please don’t hesitate to give us a call or shoot us an email if at any point you have additional questions or questions that relate to your specific situation. We are always happy to help.
Cheers!
-Steve & Sandra
Steve 206-769-9577 stevehill@windermere.com
Sandra 206-271-7100 sbrenner@windermere.com
