Jan. 2, 2012 - 2012 Kirkland Home Prices - West of Market
West of Market Kirkland is the commonly used name for the area called "Market" on the Kirkland City Neighborhood Map. For real estate valuation purposes, the homes and land closest to Market Street, as in seeing the traffic and hearing the traffic noise, will of course have an impact on price. Goes without saying. Those closest to the water...the opposite. Many if not most homes have a view, so separating by view considerations is a case by case basis.
If you want a nice home West of Market, you have to be vigilant! Hard to believe, but there is only ONE home for sale there at the moment.
One home for sale...WOW! That even surprises me! 4 Pending Sales. 38 sold this year. One for sale. Holy Caboley!
Running median home price West of Market is not going to help you, as the devil is in the details.If you want a decent newer house, plan on spending at least $1,100,000 and UP.
If you are willing to live further from town in West of Market, the prices are generally lower from 16th Ave to the end of West of Market around 20th. Not cheap...not even necessarily lower than $1,100,000 for a decent newer house. But less than one that is closer to town.
For future value, a crappy house on a good lot is the better bargain these days, because of the land play. A teardown is more likely to increase in value than a new house. Mainly because the builders are not out and about, so land value has reduced significantly. Almost no one wants to gamble on building a spec house these days.
So grabbing a home you can barely live in, especially South of 14th Ave and not near Market Street, is the best strategy at the moment. Price that option at between $450,000 and $650,000, depending on the house and the lot. That is not counting right on Market Street or very near it.
Then you have the middle ground between $650,000 and $1,100,000. Usually a house built in the 90s by an OK builder, or a newer house built up at 18th to 20th, or an older house that has been expanded, remodeled or updated over the years.
The main issue is if you really have your heart set on West of Market...you have to be vigilant, as there will not likely be more than TEN homes in a YEAR in each of these varying options. Median Home Price means nothing here. If you want a house in any of these price ranges, you have to be ready to pounce, and also know when a house is over or underpriced. If you don't know that...you will lose the best and get stuck with the worst.
Walk it...know it...West of Market is not a place for Amateurs. Become an expert so that you will know the right house when it comes along...and quickly.
Even if price is no object for you...you still have to be vigilant, as there is not a lot of inventory...ever. No looking at 20 homes and picking one after thinking about it for a few weeks. Prepare yourself to be ready by studying the market...walk every inch of it if you can.
Knowledge is not optional in this area, West of Market, it's a must.
Jan. 1, 2012 - Kirkland Neighborhood Homes Prices 2012
It is important to note that Kirkland WA has changed as to the homes that now appear in the stats, because they have added 2 neighborhoods and modifed at least one other, due to Annexation of more territory.
For that reason I will be posting the stats for each neighborhood separately, and will link those posts at the end here as I complete each one.
Home Prices in Redmond WA 98052, based on closings since Jan 1, 2011. Median Price is $450,000. That means of the 159 homes sold in that period, half the people who bought homes paid less than that, and half the people paid more than that.
What should a "median priced home" look like? Before you look at what the HOUSE "looks like", you need to study the underlying value proposition.
A median priced home in 98052 should for the most part be EQUAL PARTS land value to "home" value and sell for about 1.1 X Assessed Value.
Now let's look at the configuration of homes that actually sold for "median price" this year.
A few interesting observations. The short sale at the lowest factor of 1.04 x Assessed Value was a new home in a lesser location. You can see that from the relationship of "improvement" value to "land value".
The highest factor of 1.34 x Assessed Value is one where the buyer did not factor in the Home Style as a consideration but the assessor does/did, as do most home buyers.
The 1.06 x Assessed Value had a higher land value than "the norm" but "the market" didn't value that at all. If the land value was the norm of $212,000 vs $246,000 the factor would have been 1.15 x Assessed Value, so the market valued the land a bit more...but not as much as the tax assessor did.
BOTTOM LINE: A basically "ideal" median priced home in Redmond would be a 2 story home costing $450,000 assessed at $410,000 wit $205,000 of that being the land value and $205,000 of that being the home's value.
If you bought a home in the mid 90s, new at the time, you can probably sell it for a little more than twice what you paid for it, with good maintenance and no real added improvements. Just those improvements you needed to be comfortable in it over the time you lived in it. Refinished floors or new carpet as example.
If you bought a home in 2003, you can probably sell it for more than you paid for it if you "spruced it up" and are "leaving it better than you found it" to a modest degree.
If you buy a home that needs a lot of TLC for a good price, you can still make money flipping it in this area.
Note: Except for the short sale, most of these sold within a week on market and all sold within 2 weeks on market. Median Price in 98052 requires vigilance to spot the good ones pretty much as soon as they hit the market.
But test the price against Assessed Value before you "jump on it".
Oct. 12, 2010 - Best Places to Live - Seattle Area
Some Fast facts - Let's assume for a minute that people spending over $2M for a house want to live in "the Best" of areas.So let's base BEST on what people actually DO vs what they SAY.
In the last six months the large majority bought in King County vs pretty much any other county. Of the 109 sold over $2M, 101 of those sold in King County.
1. Best place to live in the Seattle Area = King County - based on what people who are spending lots of money are actually doing.
Let's move on to which City in King County, using the same logic and criteria.
23 in Bellevue + 3 in Clyde Hill + 3 in Hunt's Point +5 Medina + 5 in Yarrow Point
I'm calling that
#1 City - 39 of 101 in Bellevuesince most of those "cities" are in or near Bellevue Zip Code 98004.
More specifically 26 in Zip Code 98004 + Medina and an additional 13 in the rest of Bellevue
#2 City - 29 in Seattle - specifically Capitol Hill, Denny Blaine, Downtown Seattle, Queen Anne, Magnolia, Leschi, Madison Park, Broadmoor, Laurelhurst
#3 City - 13 on Mercer Island
#4 City - 10 in Kirkland (8 of those in 98033 and 2 in 98034)
Buying a home near Microsoft comes with some harsh realities that may not match what you "want" in a home. If you are planning to live near work, it is a good idea to look at what your options will likely be before going out to look at homes to buy.
For the purpose of this post I am using a 2.5 mile radius of "Microsoft" Redmond Campus. My start point for the radius was at 148th Ave and 36th (basically in the parking lot of Bellevue Manor condos). The stats are for Single Family Homes ONLY and the 2.5 miles takes you roughly to NE 8th in Bellevue going South, Redmond Way going North, slightly West of the 405 going West and to Lake Sammamish going East. I excluded homes with Lake Views, since they are in a class of their own and represent a small % of homes sold with a cost for that view.
If you open the category on this blog marked "tracking the market" you will see several entries for KBR or Kirkland, Bellevue and Redmond. As you can see in the chart below, the large majority of homes sold in 2010 within 2.5 miles of Microsoft are in Bellevue and some are in Kirkland, even though the Microsoft Campus is in Redmond. 148th Ave, which I call "the front of Microsoft", is the border line of Bellevue and Redmond. Marymoor Park and Lake Sammamish occupy a large portion of the "space" on the Redmond side within that 2.5 mile radius. That is why homes in Bellevue tend to outnumber those in Redmond when looking at the home sale stats closest to the Redmond Campus of Microsoft.
One of the harshest realities about living near work for Microsoft employees is the age of the homes nearby. Many are "old" and few are "charmingly old" and many, many have asbestos and lead based paint which was prevalent in building materials prior to 1978.
To understand this you have to understand the difficulties of getting across Lake Washington prior to 1963 when the 520 Bridge between Seattle and The Eastside was first opened for travel purposes.
That will help you understand why NONE of the homes sold within 2.5 miles of Microsoft in 2010 were built prior to 1955. No quaint older homes built in the early 1900s in that radius zone.
It will also help you to understand why so very many of the homes built on "The Eastside" near Microsoft were built between 1956 and 1978. A full 60% of all homes sold YTD 2010 near Microsoft, were built during that period. The pie chart below breaks the age range down for you. I use 1978 as a cutoff because lead based paint and other hazardous materials were pretty much banned at that time. So 1978 is a very important date in housing.
"Over 80% of all homes built in the U.S. prior to 1978 have lead based paint in them." Asbestos in the home is not as easy to define by a given year. Many homes built up to 1990 have some form of asbestos, and asbestos usage is not banned entirely even at that point. MOST IMPORTANTLY, the presence of lead paint and/or asbestos DOES NOT normally come up in the course of normal home inspections! So you have to know what to look for when it comes to asbestos and pretty much accept as a given that there is lead based paint in the house if it was built prior to 1978.
As you can see in the chart below, buying a newer home is easier said than done. Of the 37 houses (out of 231 sold) that were built in the year 2000 or later, only 18 of those cost $700,000 or less and 15 of those 18 were in Redmond and many of those 37 were in less than ideal locations given all of the best lots already have old houses on them. "tear downs" near Microsoft are not nearly as common as they are in Downtown Kirkland (as example), so buying a newer home at an affordable price usually means going out to Education Hill in Redmond or over to Issaquah or Sammamish...more travel time to work.
Often if a home buyer sits down and writes down everything they want in a home, they will NOT be finding those things "close to Microsoft" as in within 2.5 miles of work. While 60% of all homes sold in Redmond 98052 in 2010 were two story homes, only 85 of the 231 homes sold close to Microsoft were two story homes. The larger majority of homes sold were older 1 story homes or split entry homes.
If you are planning to buy a home near Microsoft, you need to know that many of the best homes are NOT awesome bargains and it is not a "buyer's market". It's not a "seller's market" either, and is pretty much a house to house issue.
231 homes sold YTD 2010 and 185 are For Sale.
On the Bellevue side in this radius there were 136 homes sold and 111 currently for sale.
On the Kirkland side in this radius there were 29 homes sold and 17 currently for sale.
On the Redmond side there were 72 sold and there are 57 currently for sale.
A lot of that has to to with the schools...particularly on the elementary school level...but that's the subject of another post for another day.
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(required disclosure: The Statistics in this post and its charts are not compiled by, verified by or posted by The Northwest Multiple Listing Service.)
Seattle blogs, that are not Real Estate Blogs, of interest:
Seattle Spin Girl About Town "the urban girl's guide to nightspots, restaurants, fashion, networking, shopping, entertainment, and fun." There's lots of interesting stuff on Girl About Town, but I wonder if the links are paid advertisements or personal recommendations, given the format. Very Seattle, I must admit, like this section on Green Drinks.
Green Drinks. Try an organic Vodka like Square One or Salmon-Safe or organic wine like Badger Mountain or biodynamic wine like Bonterra that takes organic to the next level.
Hmmm, not too sure how up to date it is given they seem to be talking about Spring Runway 2008! Be careful to check the dates on events and make sure they are not talking about last year.
Street Fashion in Seattle - Pike and Pine Blogis clearly worth a visit to check out the photos, but again...somewhat out of date and clearly not enough posts to garner daily or even weekly visits.
Urban Fashion Network Is more to my liking regarding variety and frequency of content. Would be better if they had categories in the sidebar. I saw a few interesting thing that screamed Seattle at first glance, like organic cotton dresses and Save The Whales by Shopping April 25th.
Feel bad to diss anyone for not blogging frequently, as I don't blog as often here on my blog as I do over at Rain City Guide. When the info is not time sensitive, and someone has been bloggng for over 3 years, a blog can have a lot of content without the need for constant frequency. But I think fashion is an area where one would expect change at least seasonally, so at least one post a week would be nice.
Let me know which, if any, of the linked blogs you think should end up in the sidebar here or over at Rain City Guide, or both.
I've decided to update this post as of today, April 9, 2008. If you are moving to Seattle you should know that here in the Seattle area home buying and selling is less of a mystery for our local residents. We likely have the best resources for finding a home online. We being the Seattle Area as a whole. Our buyers and sellers are tech savvy. We have cutting edge sites like Redfin and Estately and JohnLScott.com to name a few.
Our clients enjoy lower than average commissions because they participate to a great degree in the home buying and selling process, given they have great resources available to them like Craigslist and Zillow and Trulia, and of course RainCityGuide where people ask questions and get real answers without fear of being "captured as a lead".
User friendly soft sell is the trend, and Seattle does it best.
UPDATE: P.S. Somehow the competition for Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World picked up this post in their contest and I'm not sure why.
Apr. 14, 2006 - The YES, NO, MAYBE tour for Relocating Buyers
I invented this back when I was doing a lot of relocation work for Coldwell Banker on the East Coast. It comes in very handy when you are touring a lot of homes the first day in a new area.
It's pretty simple. You each have three little cards (kind of like Richard Simmons' Deal a Meal - yes, it was that long ago when I came up with this.) One card says YES, one says NO and the other says MAYBE. You can only use ONE card in each house.
At each house you are not allowed to say a word to one another until you make your selection from the three cards. If you are touring homes with an agent, you hand her one of the cards as soon as you know your answer, not how you think your spouse will feel about the house. Since there is a MAYBE card, this should be a fairly quick procedure for most people.
If the agent gets handed two NO cards as soon as they walk in the front door, you can all get back in the car. Unless the owner is home, in which case you do a pity pass through. Easier than saying we already know we hate this house.
If you have all NO cards played at the end of the day, chances are what you dont like is your price range, and you may have to go back to your new employer and say, what you offered to pay me is not enough to live here.
If you have three YES houses where you both said YES, you may as well toss out the MAYBE houses and go back at the end of the day to the three YES houses and spend more time in them.
I usually ask people to rank their YES choices as they go. First YES, no ranking. Second YES, you have to label one #1 and the other #2. This way if you have 7 yes houses at the end, you can go back to #1, #2 and #3.
Why did I feel the need to invent this system? Can't people know if they like a house without a little card?
Here's why.
1) Sometimes the relocated spouse feels guilty about making the family move and says "Whatever my sweetie wants will be fine with me." ... until it is time to sign the contract and wants to offer 80% of asking price. That's called saying yes and meaning no. It's a passive/aggressive thing some people do
2) The wife walks in first and starts saying things like, "Well, we could take this wall down over here and we could add a master bathroom...", take it from experience, that's a NO. Before they start arguing over how they are going to afford the time and money to do all of that stuff, get a NO card and GET OUT! Otherwise they will be crying and fighting before you get to house number 4.
3) When they both hand me a YES card and find out that the other party agrees, they can move through the house really evaluating whether or not they should actually buy it, instead of discussing whether or not the other likes it. You will be amazed at how happy they both are when you tell them they both said YES. Sometimes one spouse is afraid to say they like the house because they don't want the other spouse to buy it just because THEY like it. It is a great moment when they both hand over a YES card.
Of course the client that keeps handing me all three cards at every house drives me nuts , or always handing me a Maybe card. Usually that is a sign that they are really not ready to buy a house at all. Good to know and something they should go home and talk about.
ARDELL DellaLoggia on Seattle Real Estate process and market including Kirkland, Bellevue, Redmond, Green Lake and most areas around the top of Lake Washington North of Downtown Seattle.
Phone: 206-910-1000 - Mailto:ARDELLd@gmail.com
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