Long time Ballard resident and local Real Estate Broker Sharon Giampietro shares a post on My Ballard every month to keep readers informed about the local real estate market. Giampietro comes from a long line of realtors and has lived in Ballard for 30 years. She is currently a Broker at Windermere Real Estate in Greenwood.
Check out Giampietro’s recap of how Greater Ballard fared this month below:
The amount of housing added in our area was down significantly in August with 196 residential listings coming on the market last month as compared to 254 in July. August seems to enjoy a reputation as our best summer month and perhaps some sellers were enjoying the weather and waiting until after Labor Day to list. With the arrival of fall, buyers are hopeful for more choices and would be happy to see a decline in bidding wars. The strong increase in home values this year may lead to more sellers deciding to list this quarter. The September report will start to tell the tale.
In some areas of the city, housing prices dropped in August, but in 705 our prices stayed virtually the same with $587,000 being the average residential sale price for both months. Last month I reported that as of the end of July 2014, our area’s average residential sale prices had gone up about 18% since the start of 2014. That is a pretty healthy growth for the first 7 months of the year and a slow increase over the rest of 2014 would make housing market observers less concerned about a bubble. Even though prices did not climb in August, the housing supply is still very tight with an inventory of just over 1 month – a normal market inventory is considered to be 4-6 months.
The number of new construction and condo listings stayed about the same as in July. In August, 61 condos were listed as compared to July’s 67 and the price remained close to July’s number of $300,000. 25 new construction homes came on the market as compared to 27 in July and the price remained steady at about $675,000. Both new construction and condos are an important components of our local inventory. As we have come out of the housing downturn, new construction has been on the upswing and there are new condo buildings in the works. A report in the Seattle Times on August 14 noted that census data shows the number of detached housing units in our area declined from 2002 to 2012. Additions to the housing market have been in the area of attached housing. Vacant land is scare and where they are allowed by code, developers are converting single family homes to attached and multifamily homes.
Greater Ballard is Greenwood, Green Lake, Wallingford and other close by neighborhoods identified as “705” in the NWMLS. All residential and condo numbers are rounded to the nearest thousand and unless noted does not include new construction. Statistics not compiled or published by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.
“Vacant land is scare and where they are allowed by code, developers are converting single family homes to attached and multifamily homes.”
In other words, existing family homes are being purchased by developers at inflated prices because the land value is worth more than the home that presently occupies it. The house is demolished and replaced by various townhouse style buildings, usually configured to exploit various loopholes in the land use code to increase the number of units and avoid neighborhood input.
There is a small net gain in (expensive) new housing units, a reduction in more affordable older homes, and huge localized short- and long-term impacts to the neighbors.
All the while classroom sizes at Adams Elementary have reached insanity levels.