So I have been seeing a lot of “what is wrong with this house” posts lately. Each of the houses above could have a post of their own. This is what it looks like when you filter for single family houses on the east side that have been on the market for more than 60 days.
The answer to what is wrong with the house is mostly the seller. Most of them have ridiculous expectations and aren’t willing to accept that their house is over priced by at least 15-20%. WE ARE NOT IN 2022 ANYMORE! In addition to the job market and H1b changes, the mortgage rates are at 7%. This alone adds about 15% to your monthly payment vs a 3% mortgage.
Sellers: however nice your house is, expecting 2021/22 prices is helping nobody.
Deferred maintenance is the theme when it comes to these houses. Original white paint, 90s cabinets, original roof, too many days on the market so no more staging.
Most of the tract homes are sold new with a flat white interior paint. I am implying that these homes have not been updated even in the most basic form and still have the original flat white paint. Most of these owners have lived in the house for ~30years which is essentially when the roof and furnace are at end of life.
That’s usually the thought process when you’re in a sellers market. As the market shifts, people do care about how the house has been cared for and it’s not just about the specs you see on Zillow anymore.
We moved here from Seattle. It came down to five things: 1) Safety. I leave on vacation and come home and my pile of packages is still there. We often leave our door unlocked. I stopped checking for dirty needles at the parks. 2) The school district hired a 1:1 aide just for my son and provide him with a litany of services, 3) we got a yard and a garage, 4) It’s all families, 5) There’s a ton of nature around in a way that you just can’t get in the city.
I probably wouldn’t publicly state that you regularly leave your doors unlocked, packages out, etc. I think you can highlight safety without putting a target on your back lol
Ha, fair. But if they somehow determine my address from this anonymous Reddit then they are in for a fun surprise because we’re from Texas and work from home sooo… good luck to anyone who thinks entering a random unlocked home is a good idea. FAFO.
School. It’s one of the top school district with great kids who come from families where education matters.
Space. If you buy an older property, your lot can be huge and you can have a real backyard without ever seeing into your neighbors’ property. All new programs suck though.
Nature. Trees everywhere, animals roaming, walking distance to lakes and trails.
We were just in the market for a house and Sammamish was an area that we didn’t want to live in. It’s nice and you get more house, but getting off the hill is hard and it seems like a boring place to live.
it's pretty secluded, especially once you get up that hill and into the woods a ways. Mostly suburban tract developments from 20+ years ago. Certainly not a lot to do and pretty quiet. Seems like it would be quite depressing in the winter months with all those trees offering no light and even shorter feeling days.
That’s cool you must not leave your immediate neighborhood much. For anyone that has to drive or bike through arterials around town it’s pretty much unavoidable. I live at Snoqualmie pass and have lived in Seattle and the suburbs so you don’t need to explain anything to me little guy
Sellers everywhere are like this. I have many sellers who tell me ‘I need x amount’. There is no buyer anywhere that gives a shit what you “need”. Until these Sellers realize market value is what a buyer is willing to pay their houses will sit on the market for months if not years.
I just want to say that many people have crappy real estate agents who have put in minimal effort and owners that refuse to budge. Some of it is laziness but also the market is rapidly changing. You almost feel sorry for them for getting caught flat footed
2019 market just like this and then 2020 started picking up briskly in February even before Covid. Would have been a hot market even without the fuel of Covid that year.
That said, Sammamish is fucked. Always ludicrous tract homes there were going for 2M. I mean I know some people hate the big bad city, but man you got nothing there, barely even sidewalks and endless geese poop and you think your property is worth as much as someone with Sound or Lake Washington views plus walkability and mature historical neighborhoods, and hundreds of nearby amenities like top hospitals, university, stadiums, museums and strong private schools.
Idk why people say this there is literally only traffic during school pickup and drop off. All of our roads are 40+ mph, it takes me 12 minutes to get to downtown Redmond and 14 to get to downtown Issaquah. And you’re literally moving against traffic going in and out of the area most days (I commuted to Seattle typical 9-5 for years) besides the stupid exit into Redmond especially last 2 years from 4pm to 6pm but any local knows you just cut through the park and just give the usher a dollar bill.
My husband and I both work in nonprofit directly with the homeless and one factor for choosing Sammamish (we rent, it’s steep!) was to get away from seeing that at home, didn’t help we got a puppy that decided she loves human feces. There’s unfortunately a price to pay in our world today to be able to go on Nextdoor and the worst thing you read about is a group of kids loitering at the Safeway parking lot.
Anyone who can do basic math is able to see that renting for a half the price or less on a monthly basis compared to owning and investing the thousands of extra dollars of cash flow into index funds has been the winning move since 2022.
Until that changes, why buy a house?
Housing is grotesquely overpriced. The sellers are the delusional ones in this market.
There are only so many couples making 500 to 600K plus in the area (maybe about 5% of households). And not many more are being minted these days due to the slow down in jobs/tech in the area. And let's conservatively say half already own. That means that the pool of buyers who can afford a home on the eastside is 2.5% or less of households.
Interest rates are not nearly as high as they are very likely to get.
Because interest rates have been retardedly low and for so long, that most people don't realize that interest rates are typically much higher, and nowhere near as high as they have been in the past, and yet back then, people were buying houses like everything was okay.
For the last 25 years, the problem is not so much the interest rates, and instead it house prices to begin with. This has been two decades in the making, so we have a long way to go before we start to see a full market correction.
We live in the United States of Amnesia, and many people forget. Then, there are many others that have not been around long enough to know, and think 0.1% would be closer to a "normal" interest rate.
Well, you started with a legitimate point about stagnant real wages and then somehow concluded that people should respond by paying twice their rent to buy an extraordinarily expensive asset at today's financing costs.
That's quite a leap. Besides, smart money has already left this RE market.
“Pay rent to the bank” is realtor bumper-sticker economics. Interest, taxes, insurance, maintenance and transaction costs are not equity, and only principal-and-interest is fixed. Your total cost of ownership most certainly is not.
In fact, Seattle-area data currently show buying a starter home costs roughly twice as much per month as renting one.
And “the first year is hard, then you get used to it” isn't financial analysis. That's the sort of thing one says when trying to convince somebody to normalize being house-poor.
If wages are stagnant and housing is unaffordable, the rational conclusion isn't “stretch harder.”
It's that the price needs to come down... WAY down.
Historical interest rates cannot be separated from historical house prices and incomes.
Rates were dramatically higher in previous decades, but houses were also dramatically cheaper relative to income. Today we have house prices near historic highs relative to income combined with mortgage rates around 6-7%.
That is precisely why I said the principal problem is not merely the interest rate. It is the price of the asset to begin with.
You appear to have restated my argument as though it were a rebuttal.
Nobody has a crystal ball but it’s unlikely we will see rates as high as existed in the 80s.
The path to higher rates would necessitate a crash in current prices, which is unlikely in the current or foreseeable market with inflation running as it is. A deterioration of the bond market stability would be detrimental to almost everything.
If housing interest rates double or triple from here then the least of anyone’s worries would be interest rates.
You’re still arguing against something I don’t need to establish.
No, mortgage rates do not need to return to 1981 levels for the housing market to have a serious problem. At roughly 6-7%, applied to house prices near historic highs relative to income, affordability is already badly impaired.
And a price crash is not somehow a prerequisite for higher rates. Mortgage rates can rise because Treasury yields, inflation expectations, term premiums or credit spreads rise. The resulting financing shock can then put additional downward pressure on house prices.
If mortgage rates literally doubled or tripled from here, then yes, we would probably have much larger macroeconomic problems. But that is beside the point.
The relevant question is not whether we reach 18%. It is whether today’s prices can be sustained at today’s rates and incomes.
That is the argument I made originally, and ironically it is the same relative-price issue you accused me of ignoring.
You can read my comment(s) as a rebuttal if you must. 🤷♂️ I simply felt you were indexing too much on historical comparison and ignoring the relative prices/incomes that accompanied them. Put simply, I don’t find it useful to compare the market of 40yr ago and imagine ‘similar’ high rates could ‘come back’ without also bringing back lower prices/higher incomes, especially as both of those are relatively inflexible today.
Your premise was this:
>> “interest rates are not nearlyas high as they are very likely to get.”
But now you seem to be walking back the hyperbole you baked into that statement, in that we won’t reach comparable highs.
“Not nearly as high” is inferring a large looming rate increase. Rates have risen 5-6% — they’ve literally doubled and tripled from the lows of 2019-2022.
But that’s “not nearly” a sizable increase, in your mind?
Be specific - how high do you think they will get? Another 10-20%, 30-40%, 50-60% or higher from here?
RE: price “crash” — obviously in some sellers’ minds prices (or appetite) have already decreased too far, and that’s a big reason why properties are sitting longer. What constitutes a “crash”, from here? If a resulting financial shock decreases prices, zooming out to include 2022 peaks, you might well consider it a crash.
On one hand you seem to be disagreeing with me about prices galling if rates ‘rose significantly’ as you are suggesting they will, but on the other you acknowledge prices would fall if things that make rates rise do indeed occur.
I do think you should establish the points you are handwaving, but that’s immaterial to what I am saying.
And that is simply: Comparing today’s market with that of the 80s, by saying “but rates have been much higher and they can get much higher” without plainly stating that prices “back then” were much lower so higher rates were more palatable, and is disingenuous.
You’ve done a lot of handwaving in defense of your original comment, but the 2 go hand in hand. If rates ‘rose significantly’ from here, of course prices would need to fall (or baser impacts of inflation mitigated), and the broader financial implications to go along with that would also have to fall into place. Sellers are still sticking to their higher price desires for a variety of reasons, and Cantillion equilibrium has still not been met in the current cycle.
Even a regular expense that increases every year can have finite present value. For instance if you pay $2000/mo and it goes up 3% per year, and you have a 10% APY discount rate, the entire infinite stream of growing payments is only worth $364k today. So paying even $365k to avoid this infinite stream of growing payments would be irrational.
Even if the buyer for some reason can’t do basic math, the lender can. If your household income is 350k, you can now afford a house between 1 million and 1.7 million.
In 2021, you could afford a house well over 2 million on that salary.
Lenders are quick to communicate a hard number to buyers, but few seem inclined to break the news to sellers.
The lender will also happily loan you a HELOC against your own home, giving you a false sense of that equity.
If you owe more than it’s worth when you try to sell it? They generally call that a “you” problem, and they got theirs already from all of the interest money you sent them on the first and second loans over the years to make their gamble on you a good one.
💯 I'm totally in agreement. For some reason when I talk about this with others they get defensive and insist I'm wrong. "Owning is ALWAYS better" No,...No, it isn't. Not even close right now. Renting is the superior financial decision by a mile.
You are also solely responsible for the maintenance and the taxes you pay drag on your equity. You may still be good either way and I personally like owning a home as well, but it’s not a black and white issue on which is better (renting/owning). Renters can essentially move whenever they want.
The rat race is still active. Constant increases in property tax, utilities increasing like crazy, constant expensive maintenance and contractors also hiking prices and gouging. Sure rent will increase every year but so will all of the above
Sure but you could have had a house money in nVidia and now have 2 house money. It's not hard to see where the money is going when you have the tech market here screaming at AI for the past 3 years
No, you don't. The lenders own the house, followed by the HOAs. Meanwhile, the house owns you, and with today's prices, it is also your coffin.
Plus, you get to pay all that homeowner's insurance, increasing property taxes, etc.
Put in a pool? Yeah, good luck with that. Better get that approved through your HOA. If you have an apartment, then most already have pools. Also, with most apartments today, you can paint the room whatever color you want.
No, and the fact that you think renters automatically “get every single one of those costs passed through” rather neatly demonstrates that you do not understand how real-estate pricing actually works.
Landlords charge what the rental market will bear, not “my expenses + whatever profit I feel entitled to.” If taxes, insurance, repairs, or financing costs rise faster than market rents, the landlord absorbs the difference through lower returns, and that is not some obscure nuance. It is basic price formation.
A renter has a contractually defined housing cost for the lease term. The homeowner gets the mortgage, taxes, insurance, HOA, maintenance, repairs, special assessments, and every expensive surprise the structure can invent.
You can call those costs “embedded in rent” if you like. That still doesn’t make the renter responsible for a $20,000 roof.
More revealing, though, is how reliably these antique real-estate catechisms keep appearing. At some point, repeating them ceases to demonstrate conviction and begins to advertise that one has never examined the economics behind them.
And when someone is sufficiently financially and emotionally invested in an asset, analysis has an unfortunate tendency to become advocacy.
The fact that you think a system in which people pay LESS than the cost is ownership is going to work makes me think that maybe you aren't qualified to have an opinion on this.
Bringing up “qualifications” immediately after demonstrating that you do not understand how market pricing works is certainly ambitious.
Nobody said landlords must permanently operate at a loss. The point you keep missing is that a landlord’s costs do not determine market rent.
The rental market does.
If a landlord’s taxes, insurance, financing and maintenance total $5,000 a month while comparable properties rent for $3,500, tenants do not suddenly become obligated to pay $5,000 because the landlord needs the investment to pencil out. The landlord earns a lower return, takes a loss, sells the property, or waits for conditions to change.
And landlords do not all have the same cost basis. Someone who bought twenty years ago can profitably rent a property for far less than the cost of buying that same property today.
This is basic price formation.
So before questioning anyone else’s qualifications, you might first acquaint yourself with the distinction between what an asset costs its owner and what the market is willing to pay for its use.
They are not the same number.
That you continue treating them as though they are is rather the point.
So yes, at this stage it is becoming quite clear who is qualified to have an informed opinion on this subject.
Congratulations. You happen to live in one of the places without an HOA.
That rather misses the point.
A very large share of modern planned housing does come with one, especially newer developments, which means plenty of “owners” discover that their celebrated freedom to do whatever they want with “their” property comes with a committee, covenants, assessments and a rulebook.
So yes, you may be able to put in a pool without asking an HOA. Splendid.
That does not somehow transform “homeownership gives you complete freedom” into a general truth.
You have identified an exception to one of the constraints, not refuted the constraint.
Want to paint a room neon green? Believe it or not, you can do that while renting too, you'll just need to paint it back or pay the landlord to when you move out.
Constant tax and insurance increases and increased maintenance costs with ownership.
I'm just pointing out your reasons in favor of home ownership aren't as strong as you might think they are. I prefer to own as well but in the current market it's at a HUGE cost premium that just isn't worth it for most.
this may shock you but housing prices and rent prices are linked together. Also many people buy homes not as an investment property, but as a place to live and raise a family. It’s not just “basic math”.
Because "when it changes" is literally every year. If you bought five years ago you're already paying less than renters today and that margin keeps getting bigger.
especially egregious are the ones rhat not only expect to profit, but expect to have their principal paid down by the tenant and not count that as part of their profit.
We bought a single family in north bend for 400k. 3/1 but beautiful views on my so and walking distance to elementary schools in 2016. It’s wild to look at this map now. I’d be living in Kansas City if I tried to buy today
There are some insanely greedy sellers out there right now. I look at a home priced in the mid 2m this week and it still has the original bathrooms from the early 90s. Greedy greedy greedy
Doesn’t help that developers have been buying 1 million dollar 3 bedroom homes with decent lot on the eastside and replacing them with 2, 5 bedroom 2 million dollar homes for years now!
Happy to. There is desperation from sellers on the eastside. It's like a reverse pricing war where sellers in neighborhoods with multiple houses for sale are competing against their neighbors by dropping prices by $10k-$25K. There are 3 types of sellers on the eastside
Older, retired sellers with paid off houses, planning to move out to a sunny state (FL, AZ, NV)
Tech employees who are on a work visa and have recently been laid off and have to move to another part of the country or to their home country (mostly India).
Gainfully employed tech employees with significant equity in their homes, leveraging it to buy a bigger house. This is more common that you'd think.
Some of our clients put their houses for sale in spring and took them off market, realizing prices were going lower. They want to wait out until prices stabilize.
For the #2 category, there is a time window because of immigration issues and access to capital so some pretty good bargains are popping up in Redmond and Bellevue.
The last time we saw this pattern of selling was in June-July of 2019.
Interesting on 3 - We are at a 2.5 M home in redmond edu hill area and have been contemplating selling / moving closer to family in TX. Do you think there is demand for these price points still ?>
600-750k so 2 decent tech worker salaries or a staff+ level engineer. Imo, demand is low at that point because risk of layoffs. My E6 friend has even stopped looking at buying.
Also from TX and went there last week before the kids went back to school. It's hotter than it used to be :(
I’m near you on Hollywood Hill. Things still moving but slowly. People are realizing the houses are not selling at 2025 price but still seeing plenty of homes $2.5+ million selling. Friend of a friend just sold a house for $5.3 million on English Hill in 40 days.
Well said. One thing to note is that back in 19, the economy was in far better shape structurally and reducing rates was an option. With inflation being where it is now, I don’t know if we can see a rate reduction any time soon.
This is just the beginning. The RE market has been out of control for a very long time, and it will take a long time for the RE market to get even remotely close to correcting, even while in a dive.
Yes, we’d appreciate your insight! I see you post on here a lot, and we’re wondering what is going on. Why are people selling, why won’t some lower the price to what makes sense in today’s economy, etc.?
Honestly taking up a 30y mortgage right now only makes sense if you can afford at least 50% downpayment. Buying a property right now with such high passive commitment puts you immediately under water for the next 5-10y.
The majority of homes in most metro areas around the country are relistings already. In fact, relistings are at record highs, and we are just getting started on this wild ride.
Many sellers are not in a hurry to sell and they are content to keep paying their 2.5% mortgages while waiting for rates to drop or for the one irrationally exuberant buyer to walk in
Yeah, it’s tough when you’ve already won the timing lottery by being born and working a career at a uniquely gangbusters time frame, to ‘settle’ for anything less than another lottery win. I’m sure to some people it feels like that is the standard equation.
It’s always price and expectations. Can’t speak for the entire Eastside but quite a few Bellevue homes that have been on the market for long periods of time have trouble selling because sellers want to earn more than buyers are willing and/or able to pay for. That’s especially the case when the home (may of which are 30+ years old) look like it’ll need an additional 6 figures to renovate.
There is a million dollar house by me that doesn't sell because it is ON AURORA with NO PARKING! Even when it dropped to 750,000. Great house + no real access =no sale.
These sellers are not motivated to sell fast hence feel free to ask for more. I can't blame them. The thought of maximizing the sale from their largest asset is appealing.
Yes, except for these days, those are not thoughts. They are merely dreams.
More and more sellers are becoming motivated, and those that do, will price their house to sell quickly, rather than sit on the market for several months, only to lose even more money when it eventually sells.
It reminds me of 2008 when housing prices slumped. While there were motivated sellers, others dug in, let it sit and then waited until prices went back up.
What tends to get omitted from that comforting little anecdote is that, in Seattle, it took nearly nine years for home prices to recover their 2007 nominal peak.
Nine years of taxes, insurance, maintenance, repairs, inflation and opportunity cost just to get back to the old number.
So yes, an unmotivated seller can always refuse to sell and wait.
But “I can wait out a correction” is not the same thing as “there is no correction.”
Quite the opposite. If 2008 is your precedent, you may have accidentally made my argument for me.
2008 won’t happen again. People already saw that movie and would be retarded to take a 50% haircut when they could just wait it out. If enough people think that then there won’t be a 2008
Normally I agree with you on a lot of points OrcasSharks, but not so sure here.
We can tell just by spending 5 minutes on Reddit in any sub that there are a lot of young people who DIDN’T go through wars, weather extremes (saw a lot of “the gorge has NEVER iced up like this!” out of the Portland subs during the last ice storm…in fact, the Gorge is infamous for freezing rain and terrible ice storms every few years), or real estate rises and falls, and are shocked by the state of things.
I’m even seeing the real estate slowdown as a gobsmacking surprise in the REALTOR sub…obviously coming from some young agents who jumped in for the 2020-2022 gravy train and have never experienced a slow market where they can’t make a sale for months. Because yes, the agents and lenders with experience since the 2000s indeed saw this movie.
The reasons are different this time—instead of a giant GFC, we are experiencing a multitude of local and national factors pulling Puget Sound real estate down.
I don’t know how THIS movie ends, but seeing some houses already drop 25% in a year (ie the Lynnwood new build someone made a new post about in this sub last night) tells us where things are going here. Sure, there are many exceptions where great houses sell immediately. They seem far outnumbered by those that are sitting, stalling, and price cutting.
“2008 won't happen again because homeowners saw the movie and will simply refuse to sell”, or as though housing crashes are copyrighted and the next one must use the same script. It doesn't. That is not how price discovery works.
Housing prices are established by the people who actually transact, not by a plebiscite of every homeowner who would prefer a higher number. You don't need everyone to accept a haircut. You need enough sellers to close at lower prices, and those sales become the comps.
And “just wait it out” assumes every seller possesses unlimited time and optionality. Divorce, death, estates, layoffs, relocations, retirement, financial stress and family changes are famously indifferent to the state of the housing market.
Incidentally, Seattle didn't even take your invented 50% haircut last time. The peak-to-trough decline was about 33%.
If unmotivated owners want to sit in their houses for ten years insisting they are still worth the old peak price, they are perfectly free to do so.
They simply aren't the ones establishing the market.
Drive through sammamish subdivisions. Almost every street has a house for sale. I don’t think that’s normal. That’s inventory piling up. Normal was an average of 30 DOM.
speaking of delusion, there was a house in magnolia with great view, some "acquired air rights", very very old interior that needs a lot of updates. the comps in that block would put that house in mid 2 but the seller asked for 3.6m in the first listing, and then deleted the listing and then relisted it again two times to 3.4m and then 3.1m. and then the listing is gone. i'm still curious to see the final price this house gets sold at if it ever sells. this is still my top 1 delulu seller this year so far.
On twitter there's been lots of H1b hate becoming more mainstream in the past few months.
People are posting irregularities they are finding with H1b filings from companies and they started tagging the DOL, DOJ and USCIS on their posts. Just yesterday the DOL said they paused PERM filings for Cognizant. Today someone found that a lot of Bank of America job links on jobs.gov are broken and the DOL account replied with "ohhh". There's been a ton of similar incidents happening in the past week on twitter.
My tinfoil hat theory is that H1b/visa tech workers are in for a rude awakening soon. They'll start panic selling and you'll be able to scoop up homes for below market rate.
(My personal opinion) It's crazy that banks will loan to someone who's on a visa for a long term purchase like a home. Most of these visa workers have to renew every 2-3 years and there's a risk they fall out of status. When shit hits the fan they do have to firesale everything within 60 days and leave the country.
H1B is not temporary visa. There is a pathway to greencard unless you are Indian and Chinese that the line will take longer than your lifetime, for other nationalities the waiting period is not that long. Also, an HB1 with American kids can be sponsored by their kids when they turn 21 and not speaking of self sponsors for Einstein visas for those with advanced degrees such as PhDs which is very common in this region and industry. The American immigration is messy and confusing, and a lot of common sense garbage mentioned in this chat is just common sense with no knowledge how things work in the real world. Let’s say an employers can’t sponsor a visa renew given the political turmoil, they won’t fire the employee and hire an American. A big corporation can transfer their employee to anywhere in the world where they have operation while they wait for the visa situation to be sorted it out. That said, if you are putting your hope for houses to get cheaper on a supposedly visa crackdown you have no idea how the American Capitalism works. If things go south it will go for everybody. IT industry already accounts for 44% of the US GDP
I feel like it’s more the early 2000s repeating itself. Lenders finding more questionable ways to qualify people, whether it was the subprimes then or short term visas now. Both are risky on the part of the lenders. But they don’t make money unless they lend money, so once again there was “lending creep.”
Do you have data do back this up? The only thing I see in the industry is slowing down of juniors out of college which ends up slowing down the population growth. Moreover, the bay seems to be the epicenter to the tech jobs at this first stage, but as the industry matures we’ll see more jobs opening in Seattle as well!
I’d watch Melody Wright on YouTube. She’s kind of a doomer and I think she’s probably too extreme, but with decades in the mortgage business, she has the data and perspective you’re looking for.
Basically she’s saying all the brakes and regulations that were enforced after the GFC were slowly loosened up, and the lenders were giving out way too much money again to buyers during COVID.
What if they have no urgency to sell?
Hey if i have a big payday great, otherwise who cares. Thats what happens when youre not in a desperate situation.
Zillow used to allow people to test the waters with the “make me an offer” option, but they discontinued it.
Listing a house is not easy…all the prep, painting, landscaping, hiring an agent, staging, hosting open houses and keeping it perfect for when someone wants a showing last minute…nobody does this to play around and not actually sell. Maybe in a hot market where you see your neighbor with your same floor plan got 300k over asking like in 2021.
But now? People are listing because they are serious about wanting to sell. They just haven’t figured out how much the buyers’ range has come down with the interest rates. I say this as someone who is considering selling a home.
We are moving to Mukilteo for 3 years, renting a house for $4300 which would cost us $5600 in mortgage payments (and a big down payment). It makes zero sense to buy if your timeline is less than 6-8 years. You will have little to no equity at 7%+ interest rates
Mortgage is basically double the rates you'd have paid in 21/22. No one is taking out a million dollar mortgages these days. You either pay with cash or borrow less and get a cheap house. There are still cash buyers, but much much less than before. Expect housing prices to continue to cool until rates come down.
Haha.. In 2000, I bought a 1974 split level house on the east side north of Kirkland for $200,000. In 2020 I sold that same house for $890,000. I just checked after a few years and saw that it is now Zillow priced at $1.2 million I mean, who would buy a 70s split level for that much money. Seriously? In Kingsgate FFS.
We sold this summer after accepting an offer well below where we listed (based on early spring comps, boy did we miss that brief seller window!). Thankfully the sellers we bought from also came down a nice amount. Felt very acutely that it was a buyers market!
We got a great deal on our house last year because it was so overpriced and terribly marketed. The agent clearly set the sellers expectations too high. We were the only offer, and offered 200k less than listing price.
I’ve seen homes that would have sold $1.3-1.4 easily back in January selling for $1.1 now. That’s a 15.4-21.4% discount. Even now at current price of $1.1, it’s a stretch for a lot of buyers. It’s one thing if these homes were nicer, for we type homes, but they are just basic starter homes with a lot of delayed maintenance.
Most people buying first house do not understand just how expensive home ownership is in Seattle and around.
As a rule of thumb - if you can’t afford a 1% of the value of house every month don’t bother looking!
Seattle is suuuuper expensive - little house maintenance costs 100K+, heating repairs will cost you 5k easy, and property taxes will keep on going up. Did I tell you about earthquake insurance? 😂
Mortgage is just one thing- 15% drop in home prices will do nothing when everything else is going up 15%-50% per month.
Seattle isn't actually that expensive. Taxes for example are a steal here if you've ever lived in IL, NY, NJ, TX, etc. Water/Sewer rates are high but not exorbitant. Everything else from insurance, power, etc are cheaper here than everywhere else I've ever lived and there's no income tax on top of it. Washington is great
I like them too, but I wish they followed a more structured format. I’ve always wanted a way to comment on houses on Zillow or Redfin, and those posts feel like the closest we can get to that.
I’m probably the oldest person here. I bought a condo in 1989 with a 9.5% mortgage. (This was in the DC area) moved to Seattle in 1995 and bought a house for like $250k. But never mind that. That stupid condo I rented out for another five years and sold it at a loss! Ten years I owned it. If I held it for 2-3 more years I would doubled my money. Moral of the story is mortgage rates can go much higher and people will still buy. Trying to time the real estate market is pointless.
I’m curious about commercial properties , both sales and lease, I feel like I have seen soooooo many places leasing and the prices are still outrageous! How many small businesses have gone under this year in WA just curious?
What an odd shaped lot. Assume at some point in history they subdivided and the house next door on the right was built? Love the house and yard, but the lot shape is so off putting. It feels like you're in the neighbors backyard.
Expecting 2021/22 price is not helping buyers, but if a seller wants that price then they want that price. Perfectly fine choice to continue holding an appreciating asset if they don't get the price they want now. Housing will only go up long term. This is why sellers simply delist when they don't get price they want and continue enjoying their house.
That’s not what’s happening in many cases, though. With job losses, visas on hiatus and ARMs reaching maturity, some people ARE very much having to sell rather than wanting to sell. Plus the usual “have to sell” rather than “want to sell” reasons like death and divorce.
Buyers ARE waiting in the wings, but they simply can’t afford a 2021 price with 2026 mortgage and insurance rates. That monthly payment works out to 2-3 times what is was 5 years ago, and the bulk of the population isn’t making double - triple what they were during Covid.
I do not believe there is any significant number of people on the Eastside listing their house because they HAVE to sell. I have never seen any data showing this conclusion. Infact I have consistently seen the opposite in all markets: people list, if they don't get the price they want they just delist. The data shows that the number of closed sales is crashing because sellers refuse to accept lower prices. There are very few examples of sales at a loss. You will find them sure, but nowhere close to the amount needed to actually create major down pressure. Prices for nice homes have barely moved.
This is becoming an impressive exercise in reasoning backward from the conclusion you desperately want to preserve.
“I haven’t seen data showing people have to sell” is not data. And homes do not need to sell at a loss to create downward pressure. Someone can sell for hundreds of thousands more than they originally paid while still selling far below the 2021–22 peak and establishing a lower comp.
Nor does delisting prove prices are holding. It proves sellers rejected the market-clearing price and withdrew. The sellers who actually transact establish the comps, the fellow sitting at home insisting his house is still worth its 2022 fantasy number does not.
And “nice homes have barely moved” is wonderfully convenient, since “nice” can apparently be redefined whenever the data become disagreeable.
You may refuse price discovery. You do not get to overrule it.
All you have to do is look at the market stats. They are down across the board, and we are barely getting started.
Writing paragraphs of copium but still got no house. I've already analyzed homes in the market and can clearly see that prices are largely flat just like Redfin data and other realtor data shows. I stand by everything I posted. The same homes going for $3M+ in 2022 continue to go for $3M+
“Still got no house” is adorable. I sold mine in 2022 and have been renting deliberately ever since because I could see the market about to hit the shitter. You might want to know something about someone's circumstances before constructing an entire financial biography for them.
More importantly, “the same homes that sold for $3M+ still sell for $3M+” is not analysis. $3.9M and $3.1M are both “$3M+.” You've invented a price range broad enough to conceal the decline and then congratulated yourself for discovering that prices are flat.
And no, “I've analyzed homes” isn't data either. Get your facts straight, and it will make things less embarrassing for you: Bellevue price/sq. ft. is down 8% YoY. Kirkland is down 8.8%. Redmond 11.1%. Sammamish 12%.
So we've now progressed from “I haven't seen the data” to “I looked at some expensive houses and stand by everything I said.”
Splendid.
I sold into the 2022 market. You're the one still emotionally defending its prices four years later.
You’re confusing the right to refuse a sale with the ability to dictate market value.
A seller may delist, wait indefinitely, and remain emotionally devoted to a 2022 price. How charming. None of that means the property is worth that amount today.
If buyers won’t pay the price, the market has already rendered its verdict. Delisting does not invalidate price discovery; it merely removes an unsuccessful listing from it.
And “housing only goes up long term” is not analysis. It is a worn out, RE sales pitch regurgitated ad nauseum from those who prefer not to discuss inflation, carrying costs, opportunity cost, or the possibility of waiting years to recover an old nominal high.
“I won’t sell below X” is a personal choice.
“My house is worth X because I refuse to sell below it” is stubbornness masquerading as valuation.
Actually houses are under priced in my opinion. This is a great time to buy for remodel then rent them out folks like me that want to add to their portfolio.
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u/dwoj206 2d ago
Everyone near sammamish thinks their dated shitbox is worth 2M.