August’s totals for Capitol Hill area sales didn’t do anything to change what has been a tough summer for real estate. Our area’s numbers match larger trends as sales continue to drop. Overall, August saw 12% fewer sales on the Hill than July’s already soft numbers. But there are some anomalies in the Capitol Hill August real estate dataset provided to us by Redfin.
The most significant is inventory. Capitol Hill as a whole is unusual in that there was an increase in the number of properties for sale in August in comparison with a year ago. In most of the country, the number of properties for sale continues to drop as sellers would rather hold on to their investment and not brave the market. Capitol Hill’s Stevens neighborhood with its predominance of single family homes exhibits this trend with a 24% drop vs. 2009. But there’s something interesting happening in the areas dominated by condos in the Hill’s dataset. In those areas, there’s actually more property on the market than last year — even with demand dropping.
You can see that drop in demand pretty clearly in August’s Hill condo sales totals, below, as only 14 units were sold out of the hundreds that listed during the month. The other weird thing about the Hill’s condo market is ongoing jump in prices. The key is that the sold price data only represents a subset — basically, prices on the most desirable units. Not shown here but from the Redfin data (xls), you can see that Capitol Hill condo list prices are actually down more than 10% vs. 2009.
For single family homes, the sample is getting pretty small as sales slipped farther from last year’s levels. The good news for homeowners thinking about eventually selling is that prices are actually stable on what is being sold. And those lucky folks in Montlake actually were able to move one more house than they did last August. When that marks a hotspot, you know things are cold cold cold.
If you’re looking for a condo or a home right now on Capitol Hill, let us know what you’re finding. Also, if anybody has ideas for how to take a similar look at the rental conditions on the Hill, we’re all ears.
My husband and I spent the summer looking for a place to buy. We were very flexible on price and property type, we looked at everything with at least 2 bedrooms and at least 750 sq ft of space. We had a really hard time finding a property we liked that was reasonably-priced. In theory, most properties should be selling at or around their 2005 value. We found, however, that what few properties are on the market are asking for more than they paid in 05, even more than they paid in early 08 and late 07. The few good-quality properties with lower prices were generally snatched up within a few days of listing, we weren’t even able to see a few places before they went off the market.
It seems like a lot of properties are languishing on the market for months without any major price adjustments and very little interest. There also aren’t a ton of properties being added to the pool, so the market is a little stagnant right now. There are definitely people looking, as evidenced by how quickly inexpensive properties are snatched up. We just finished negotiating on a property we like very much which has seen significant price reductions over the course of the summer. The seller was loathe to lower the sale price much below what they were asking, so we managed to get a ton of freebies and credits from them to sweeten the deal. I doubt we’ll be able to sell it for what we paid in 10 years, but at least we’ll have a nice place to live.
Kerry, awesome comment about your first-hand experience into what is going on with Hill real estate! And congrats on finding a place, just curious though, sounds like you were looking at/bought a home, not a condo?
(Disclaimer: I work at Redfin the company that supplied the data for this post.)
We looked at condos, townhomes, single family homes and co-ops. We wound up buying a townhome, even though a condo was really what we had in mind. We had a very difficult time finding condos we liked at reasonable prices. When it came down to deciding between two properties, one was a townhouse and the other was a condo, and they were asking approximately the same price. We found that the townhouse was a significantly better value, as it would have been difficult to get the condo seller to lower their price to what we thought it was worth.
I’m looking at condos currently, mainly in Pike & 12th area. It’s still very much a buyer’s market and listing agents are pretty desperate to sell places that have been on the market a long time (some at 180+ days, some at almost a year).
I heard that tour traffic has dropped off a lot compared to a couple months ago (July). Most of the units that have been on market a long time have had either multiple small price reductions (eg, 3-4 10k drops) or a couple large reductions (1-2 10% drops).
Selection/availability seems better IMO in Cap Hill than in Fremont, downtown, or Pioneer Sqr.
Anecdotally, it’s pretty slow out there.
Our 1 bedroom unti in north capitol hill coop has been on the market for almost a month. We felt like we priced pretty aggressively ($290/sqft, which is what we paid in ’05) but we haven’t had too many people come by. Additionally, very few of the comparables I’ve been tracking have moved and there hasn’t been too many new units come on the market.
It’ll be interesting to see the Sept numbers.