Jgnet Real Estate Blog

The Bainbridge real estate market, which is a subsidiary of the larger metropolitan Seattle real estate market, has been showing generally negative trends with a few notable exceptions in the most recent months of 2010. According to an article by Inman News in the Seattle Times, “The most recent numbers for home sales showed a surge, but inventory may continue to rise beyond the summer, according to an analysis by Seattle-based Zillow.com. Both the National Association of Realtors (NAR) and the National Association of Home Builders credited the federal tax credits – $8,000 for first-time buyers and $6,500 for repeat buyers – for the March jump.” The April 30, 2010 article continued to note that “Even as existing-home sales rose, however, more homes hit the market last month than were sold. Raw unsold inventory rose 1.5 percent to 3.58 million units, according to data from NAR. ‘While the fact that March sales numbers are increasing is undoubtedly a positive sign, (that rising figure) does make one at least ponder whether the market is currently capable of clearing itself of inventory without paying people to buy homes (through tax credits),’ wrote Stan Humphries, Zillow’s chief economist.”

Home prices have been another problem for Bainbridge homes for sale, according to an online article for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This piece found that “Home prices in Seattle dropped 0.8 percent from January to February on a seasonally adjusted basis and 5.6 percent from a year ago, according to the latest Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller 20-city home price index. The continued drop comes at a time when the 10- and 20-city indexes both showed year-over-year increases for the first time since December 2006.”

Bainbridge real estate may also suffer from the effects of increased foreclosures in King County, which were mentioned in an April 30, 2010 article in the Puget Sound Biz Talk. This piece, written by Al Scott, reported that “The home foreclosure crisis in King County is getting worse, due in large part to a backlog of unsold houses that are clogging up the system…Now, prime borrowers are falling into foreclosure, too, whether they were with WaMu or not.”