The Short Report - April 2022

Are you somebody that is wondering what's happening in the local Seattle area, Bellevue east side real estate market?

That's a question that's on your mind.

That's what I'm going to talk about in this post.

For those of you who don't know me, my name is Nate Short I've been a realtor for 20 years, and I want to welcome you to my short report that I put out every month.

This is our April, 2022? addition, and I want to delve right into it.

Like what is happening in the market?

I mean, the market is, lots going on and there definitely is a little bit of a shift going on.

I want to talk a little bit about that now. And most of my short reports in the past, I talk about this supply issue because you know, supply demand, we still have a ton of buyers out there, still a lot of activity in open houses, although our activity has slowed down a little bit.

Some of the buyers out there wanting to get in on these interest rates before they'd go up even more now they've already increased quite a bit over the last six to eight weeks.

And so there's a little bit of a rush to get in and get homes under contract.

And at the same time, some of the buyers are saying, Hey, I think I'm going to sit out and see what happens for a little while.

And so that mentality is starting to shift a little bit.

Our inventory has gone from about 0.4 to about 0.8 months supply in a couple of months, just for your information, you know, anything under about two months supply is considered a balanced to sellers market.

A balanced market really is like two to four months supply anything over four months supply is typically where, you know, a buyer's market.

And of course we haven't seen that since, gosh, 2012.

We probably won't see that for a while.

But there is a demand out there, certainly from the millennial generation that is about 50% of our buyers out there.

They're finally getting out of the rentals, maybe living with their parents, they're going out and they're buying homes, but the cost of homes are actually, you know, going up. And that is mainly because we have restricted supply.

We're just not building enough homes, we're about 4 million homes behind nationwide. And certainly that's true in Seattle.

It's harder to build. It's more expensive to build, takes longer to get permits. And we have this demand from, of course the millennial generation who's wanting to now buy homes, so, there's a lot of different factors that are going on.

And I guess that's the point of this post is just to say, , if you're a buyer out there, it really depends on finding the right home.

I think you can be a little bit more choosy now because demand is leveling off a little bit and also you have an opportunity to look for homes that have been on the market for a few days, even, you know, a couple of weeks people thought they were going to sell their homes really quickly.

And now maybe there's a time to go in and offer an at list in price or even lower than a listing price offer. And at the same time for sellers out there it's really an amazing time to be looking at selling because market has gone up about 30% last year.

We've seen some significant increases through Q1 of this year, but right now is a great time to be thinking of selling because there still is the demand, but these interest rates are going up.

In fact, the price to buy a home just over the last six to eight weeks has gone up about 27%. And that's when you factor in this increase in interest rates.

So there's just tons going on.

If you have any questions or you want more information, you can certainly contact us at our office, call me on my cell phone.

I look forward to talking to you in future short reports, and I want to thank you for reading this post.