Snohomish County WA Home Prices For March 2011 [Video]

Snohomish County Real Estate Home Prices.

Snohomish County Homes Trends and Pricing. Learn where the Washington real estate market is going, what is affecting Snohomish County Home Prices and why.

A class on WA Real Estate Statistics where we dove into Snohomish County Real Estate Statistics and the market. How the market is being affected by Bank Owned Properties, Short Sales, the Economy, etc. and When did Snohomish County Real Estate Peak?

Snohomish County graphs and pictures used in this presentation:

Snohomish County WA Home Prices Video:

Video Transcript:

Anton: All right. Thank you guys for coming. We are going to talk about Snohomish County real estate statistics today. Then as you guys have any questions as they pop up, we’ll specifically take time to look at them. Right now, right here, we’re looking at the market dynamics slide. Basically, what this is, is this is the median price for . . . the red line
is the For Sale, the purple is the Under Contract, and the green is the Sold, and the median price for the last two years.

All of us really know what’s been going on in the market. We’ve been talking about it for years now. June of ’07 was our peak. Since then, we’ve come down approximately 33%.

But what’s happened in the last two years? Basically, in the last two years, you can see that when we compare our solds, our solds are down 9.1%, and the for sales are down 13.6%. The under contracts are down 11.4%. In other words, most of the inventory that’s for sale is still overpriced by a little over 4%, and that’s why it’s not selling. So if the average seller made a reduction in their price of 4%, they would then become a sold property.

Any questions about this slide? Okay. I’m just going to go on to the next one. This one right here . . .

Participant: When you do that statistic, is that statistic including the short-sales and foreclosure stuff? That even the short-sales and foreclosures stuff is overvalued by 4%.

Anton: If we take all the sellers – and we’re talking about the median- so what this is, is the middle of all of the sellers. Yes, by about 4%, all for sale properties are overpriced. Most likely what it is, is the short-sale and foreclosure inventory is priced at or slightly below market. Then the traditional seller is priced probably higher than that, and then the two are evening each other out a little bit.

Participant: But you’re just generalizing, saying that everything on the market is overpriced by 4%.

Anton: As one giant generalization, absolutely. We’re going to talk about this more in detail when we break down into county, but it’s very interesting. If you look at the months of supply, we’ve seen a steady decrease right here, in the beginning of the year. We’re going to talk about this on another slide. A steady decrease in the months of supply. That’s a good economic indicator for us. Actually, right now, for the month of March, we’re looking at more of a neutral style market.

Participant: If I understand it, six months is a neutral market.

Anton: Yeah exactly.

Participant: And we’re at 5.6 right now.

Anton: Exactly. If you’re at 5.5 to 6.5, you’re going to say neutral. Anything above that, you’re going to definitely be in a buyer’s market. Below that puts you into a seller’s market. It’s very interesting, with all of the foreclosure activity that we’ve been seeing in Snohomish County, to see the months of inventory dip under that six month mark. We have not seen less than six months of inventory in the last two years. Maybe three, yeah.
It’s been a long time.

Participant: So if the banks are looking at this situation, why aren’t they releasing more stuff on the market? Because right now, it seems like it would be the intelligent time to release on the market.

Anton: I wish I knew the answer to that million dollar question. I think that there are a lot of things. The robo-signing debacle is coming to a head, where they’re going to start handing out settlements. Okay. So people have not been foreclosing at the very high level. There’s also some of the bigger banks have imposed their own foreclosure moratoriums, that can possibly slow things down. Like Roy mentioned in the buyer panel, I think we just had a phenomenal March and February relative to last year. We’ll talk about that a little bit more in a bit. And
that’s what helped us suck up inventory. I don’t think people expected it to be as good as it was.

Participant: Interesting.

Anton: I’m going to scoot on from that one.

Participant: I was going to ask you. I had a question.

Anton: Go ahead.

Participant: You don’t mind if I ask questions, since there’s only a couple of us here.

Anton: No go ahead, ask away.

Participant: So like this shadow inventory? In the back of mind, I think it’s kind of blown out of proportion. Could I be wrong on that? Like on, you know, what you guys are talking about with the banks holding the inventory.

Anton: How much do you think they have?

Participant: Well, I mean, I talk with commercial bankers. I talk with all these different people, and a lot of the inventory, they’ve tried to get it off the books so the Fed doesn’t come in an actually close them down. Like Cascade Bank had trouble or whatever. So they’re trying to . . .

Anton: Cascade got bought by Opus. North County. Frontier . . .

Participant: So they’re trying to unload them. With the inventory being half of what it was, why would they be holding all this inventory? So I kind of wonder . . .

Participant: Are we talking about in Snohomish County or the United States? Let’s talk about Snohomish County.

Participant: I’m talking about Snohomish County.

Participant: Okay. Perfect.

Anton: We’ll get to some foreclosure stats here in a bit. I think there is a backlog of shadow inventory here in Snohomish County, and I think it’s pretty much the same as it is on a national level. We’ll go over some foreclosure statistics specifically, and I’ll show you how you can look and show yourself where that inventory is and who’s holding it.

Participant: Okay. Sounds awesome.

Anton: Okay. This one is another real interesting report. So once again, this is just like Snohomish County as an overview, broken down by price brackets. So what’s happening in these price brackets right here, it’s just putting it in perspective. You see a lot of inventory that’s popping up right here in the middle. That $160,000 to $200,000 bracket, you’ve got 517 active listings. $200,000 to $250,000, you’ve got 864 active listings. $250,000 to $300,000 bracket, 637 active listings. Then we start to break out a little bigger. In the $300,000 to $400,000 bracket, there’s 700. The interesting thing is even though in the $200,000 to $250,000 there’s 684 active listing, 228 of them went pending in the last 30 days. So in that $200,000 to $250,000 price range in Snohomish County, that’s a big turnover. That’s a lot of that inventory going away very quickly. You can also see where a lot of inventory isn’t going away. For instance, in the $1 million plus range, there’s currently 79 active listings, and 0 have sold in the last 30 days.

Participant: Wow look at that. Between $300,000 and $400,000, that’s the second highest moving . . . well, no, $160,000 to $200,000. But that’s still a huge . . .

Anton: Yeah. $160,000 to $200,000 would probably be number two. Yeah, $160,000 to $200,000, you’re still seeing large turnover right there. What this most likely is associated with is affordability. So from $160,000 to $250,000, this probably represents the largest percentage of the total buying population in Snohomish County.

Participant: $160,000 to $400,000?

Anton: Yeah. You could even go all the way to $400,000. But I would actually say $160,000 to $250,000 based on pendings in the last 30 days. So in other words, if you’re priced well in this category, you have the most likelihood of selling. Okay. We’re going to move on to the next slide. It is the Snohomish County Area Market Statistics Report. Basically, what we’re going to look at here, and then we’re going to talk about the inventory. So from March 2010, we’re looking at the top right corner here. We’re comparing the number of units that sold between 2011 and 2010. The number of units is only down 3.8%. Year-to-date, we’re down 3.9%. This is a very good indication of stability starting to happen, because what was happening last year at this time?

Participant: Tax credit.

Anton: The first time home buyer tax credit was artificially inflating the market by giving buyers incentives to move in. So if we’re doing just 4% worse than last year, that’s phenomenal. We have no extra stimulus. Interest rates are really, really good. Okay? That maybe a factor. Then I think your second factor is most likely the affordability in Snohomish County is reaching a point where it’s really starting to entice buyers to come into the market. Looking at the average price for Snohomish County, when you compare March of 2011 to March of 2010, you’ve seen a 9.9% drop in price. When you compare the year-to-date, you see a 10.4% drop in price. Going over to the median, which is almost exactly
similar numbers, March to March is 10.7%, and then year-to-date is also 10.7%. Average, once again, being the total of all the properties divided by the number available. Then median being the middle of the road. What is also interesting that we’re seeing in March . . . when we talked about February statistics, is February statistics over the last 14 months, we’ve averaged a half a point to three-quarters of a percentage drop in depreciation every month. So just nice, consistent. What happened in February, though, is we actually saw a 2% drop. So February, for some reason, just
really took a beating, and we were asking the question – Todd was in that class too – was, well is this a trend? In other
words, have we started to depreciate faster again, or was this just one bad month? From March’s numbers, it looks like it was just one bad month, because March then depreciated about 0.75% relative.

Any questions about Snohomish County?

Snohomish County Months of Supply Video:

Video Transcript:

Anton: Once again, now we’re back to all of Snohomish County. So all of Snohomish County, we’re going to talk about months of inventory. It’s this one right here.

Participant: Okay.

Anton: Months of inventory for overall Snohomish County, and we’ve mentioned this earlier, but we’re at 5.6 months worth of inventory. That’s a neutral market.

Participant: Yeah. That’s right.

Anton: Okay. That’s not a strong buyer’s market. It’s not a strong seller’s market. But it is faring much better than what we’ve seen in the last 14, 16 months when we were in the 7+. At one point, I believe, we hit 16 months worth of inventory.

Participant: Yeah.

Anton: Todd and I were speculating why. Answer, we don’t know. Very interesting to look at East City specifically and the city of Lynnwood with only 4.7 months worth of inventory. That’s definitely turning into a seller’s market, the City of Lynnwood. One of the reasons for that, I think, would be the affordability of Lynnwood. Lynnwood is definitely closer to major job centers, such as, the Seattle Metro.

Participant: Can you say Lynnhood instead of Lynnwood?

Anton: Lynnwood, the city of big hair and Camaros. Another interesting one, which you wouldn’t necessarily think, Monroe, 4.3 months. Clearly a seller’s market in Monroe currently. Any questions about the overall stats right there?