April Condo Market Report: Prices Recovering! Nothing for Sale

It has been absolutely way too long since we last looked at the condo market in Seattle. I’ve just been too infatuated with pretty houses and too busy skiing. And the fact that every time I wrote a report I got more depressed about the value of the two condos I bought in 2007. But I’ll despair no more, there is good news!

So what’s going on with condos in the city of Seattle?

Buyers are finding that there is nothing for sale (we are at an all time low for as long as we’ve been tracking things) but condo owners are psyched because it looks like we hit a bottom in January and prices are now on the rise ($/sq. ft is up from $277 in January to $303 in April).

Median Sale Price Increased 6.5%

The median price for condos in Seattle was $254,625 in April, up 6.5% from $239,000 in March. Year-over-year median price is down 7.6% as at this time last year it was $275,000. The median sale price for $/sq. ft. was $303 in April up 4.8% from $289 in March but was down 3.8% from last April. Is it too soon to call the bottom as January 2012?

Sales Up 13.8%

There was 198 sales in April, up 13.8% from 174 sales in March. Last April there was 182 sales. When we look at the number of business days in April compared to March and take that into account, sales were up a whooping 19.2%.

Fewer Condos For Sale

On the last day of April there were 582 condos for sale. On the last day of March there were 612. This is a 4.9% decline. Last April there were 1,053 condos for sale, a 44.7% decline. There are way fewer for sale now! Which may explain why we’re all bored of what is out there. Perhaps sellers are waiting until next year because they’re anticipating even greater price gains?

Months of Supply Dwindling

We’ve also seen the sale-to-list continue to tick up to 97.2%, continuing its trend upward over the past year. Deals are likely harder to get because sellers are more realistic when they put their place on the market. (It was 96.9% in March and 95.3% a year ago.)

Data by Neighborhood

Wondering what your neighborhood or townhomes are doing? Check out Redfin’s spreadsheet with all the details. For many neighborhoods you’ll find 12 months worth of data.

What Does the Future Hold?

I suspect prices will continue to creep up because of the lack of supply but as would-be sellers see the gradual increases in sales prices more folks will try and sell their places.

What Do You Think?

Have you been shopping for a condo recently? What do you think of what’s available for sale? Made any offers? How did those go?

Redfin has a spreadsheet available if you want to dig into the data for for a neighborhood or city not included here (or for single-family home and townhouse data.) You can also checkout the spreadsheet I have for putting the graphs together.

Disclaimer: I work at Redfin and this is one of the projects my team works on.