I just uploaded the Seattle home sales statistics by neighborhood for December 2009 to my website for clients to access, so I thought I would share them on my blog as well. I have broken out single family residences and condos by neighborhood for analysis. The Talon Title Group compiles this data for me and I find it helpful when counseling buyers and sellers about the current market conditions. Most title companies can only create this data by zip code. But having it by actual neighborhood is much easier to use (unless you are a postal worker🙂
Some neighborhoods don't have enough transactions to give you an accurate picture of the market. So it might make sense to analyze nearby neighborhood data as well to get a better idea what's really happening.This December year we had fairly significant drops in values in most parts of the city. This may be partly due to the tax credit pushing first time buyers to close by the end of November in order to qualify for the credit, leaving a lack of buyers for the month of December. Since that has been extended we have seen increased activity in the market again.
On a related note, the NWMLS (Northwest Multiple Listing Service) just published their Brokers report showing their 2009 totals. The NWMLS encompasses 19 counties and about 80% of Washington State's population, Their report shows that total single family homes and condo sales were down in 2009 about 3.7% from 2008 levels. That totals about 52,000 transactions for a combined sales value of more than $17 billion dollars.
(neighborhood data provided by the Talon Title Group. Data may or may not be accurate and no guarantees are implied. The condo year-to-date data only reflects data collected from July 2009 because it was unavailable in this format before that.)