The local real estate market may be “starting to bounce off the bottom,” said Diedre Haines, Coldwell Banker Bain’s regional managing broker for Snohomish County.
More lookers are turning into buyers. Interest rates remain favorable. Good loan programs are available. And at least some sellers are starting to get realistic about the value of their homes, she said.
Haines hopes those tentative signs might mean the end to an unpredictable market, one where a house can sit on the market for months without activity and suddenly for no discernible reason receive multiple offers. It’s a market where many sellers refuse to believe their house has dropped thousands in value.
“It’s pretty much across the board a strange market,” said Haines, who manages about 100 agents in offices in Everett, Edmonds and Lynnwood. “I’ve seen some houses in the same neighborhood where one is sitting for 190 days and another one goes in 45 and up until recently there hasn’t been much rhyme or reason.”
What does seem to make a difference is pricing, Haines said. A few years ago, pricing for some agents consisted of asking a seller, “How much do you want?”
The number of homes for sale in the county has nearly doubled in two years. The number of homes and condominiums for sale in the county in September was 7,070. Two years ago, it was 4,527. With so much choice, buyers can bypass overpriced homes.
“If it’s overpriced and the price drops, that really stigmatizes the property,” Haines said.
Her advice to sellers: find an agent who has completed a thorough market analysis by neighborhood, and she said that analyses should be more complex than finding three homes that sold in the neighborhood in the last six months.
Business at Vern Holden’s Mill Creek Windermere offices dropped 35 percent in August 2007 and it’s remained at those levels, he said. Ten of his 75 agents left the business. Fewer buyers are walking through the doors. The silver lining is those who do are serious.
“These buyers are people relocating to the area, they want to move up or they just started a family,” he said. “They have their finances in order.”
Those buyers can expect to find lower prices and plenty of homes to choose from. The median price of a single-family home in Snohomish County in September was $332,000 — about a 10-percent drop from September 2007. Meanwhile, the value of condominiums in the county increased to $246,000 from $239,950.
Prices are coming down but Holden didn’t expect they would drop much further. Some of the best deals might be new construction. “A builder could be sitting on 30 or 40 homes that need to be sold,” said Holden. “And he’s not making one payment, he’s making 30.”
In some cases the bank is taking those properties back and selling them for less than comparable houses, he said.
Reporter Debra Smith: 425-339-3197 or dsmith@heraldnet.com
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