Seattle Housing Values Continue to Boom

Seattle continues to maintain the nation’s fastest-growing home prices. While San Francisco still holds the record for the most sustained growth in the price of single-family homes with a 20-month streak that ended back in 2001, Seattle is now only three months away from tying.

The perpetual urban sprawl of Seattle makes new construction projects difficult to initiate. Few opportunities to begin construction on new homes, single family or multi-family, without demolishing existing homes. Very few of these buildings are unoccupied, as well. The profit is there for the making, but with a much higher initial investment cost than what it would take to begin construction on undeveloped land.

The very limited supply of new construction homes in Seattle only puts additional pressure on existing home prices, resulting in extraordinary home and rent prices throughout the city.

Existing Homes

There doesn’t seem to be any turning back for the Seattle housing market. Presently, only 44 homes available for resale in urban centers of 80,000 or more residents. Many areas, such as Wallingford, are opposed to tearing down existing single-family homes to make room for vertical construction to accommodate more families.

Every detail contributes to increasing property value and rent. With feverishly growing demand and a dwindling supply, we can only expect the trend to continue.

New Construction

Investors are still looking to build on what remaining undeveloped land there is left in Seattle. Now, however, they are hoping to take full advantage of what is currently one of the hottest housing markets in the country.

Quadrant Homes, a Bellevue-based division of Irvine, California’s TRI Pointe Group, has agreed to buy 17.8 acres in Laurelhurst, between the Seattle Children’s complex and the University of Washington. They intend to build 63 luxury single-family homes, each with an anticipated selling price of roughly $2 million. This is the first proposed community of private single-family homes in Seattle in decades.

Whether this proposal will be a success or not is still up in the air. Locals have opposed similar projects, often because they’d rather preserve undeveloped land or build connected units and multi-family homes to help alleviate the Seattle housing crisis. While proposals for the construction of luxury homes don’t affect the market of your average single- or multi-family home, they do serve as an indicator of the direction the market is going.

Buying and Selling

Selling is easy, but finding a new Seattle home to move into is an extremely difficult maze to navigate. The same goes for new Seattleites looking to buy a home here. This is where having a friend accustomed to the market pays off.

Ewing and Clark has been helping buyers and sellers in the Seattle area for over 100 years. We are familiar, and comfortable, with the intensity of the housing market here.

For help buying or selling your Seattle property, call us at (206) 441-7900 or visit our Contact page.