Downtown Seattle Condos | Blog & Reviews by Wendy & Marco

Inventory for Seattle Condos in Belltown & Downtown Continues to Plunge: Less than 1/6th of 2009 Levels

The Seattle Times ran a story a few days ago reporting that Belltown and Downtown new condos are filling up so I figured I'd dig a little deeper and share some data for SCR readers. 

I included a quick year-over-year inventory analysis below.  What's surprising is how inventory is now even lower than 2007 levels and less than 1/6 (!) of the peak in 2009.

Seattle's Escala Penthouse, a Billionaire Businessman, and a Naive College Student

It's not every day you get to talk about dominant-submissive relationships on this condo blog.  At least not literal ones.  

In this case, the NY Times bestselling book series (and potential movie) "Fifty Shades of Grey" features a condo building in Seattle called Escala where the characters make sweet love all over the place in the penthouse.  

As you may know, Escala is home to major league Pitcher Tim Lincecum as well. Granted, he is in the sub-penthouse making the fictional story of Christian Grey's exploits above all the more plausible.

Here's some pics and more info on the new Seattle cause for celebrity from Zillow.  We now have werewolves, steamy billionaires, and sleepless romantics as some of Seattle's hollywood brand associations -- pretty cool IMO! 

By Wendy Leung with Seattle Condo Review. A guide to Seattle condos exclusively for buyers and sellers.

Analysis of Seattle Condos: April 2012

The April numbers are in and it looks like it was a pretty solid month.  Below are the tables I know you all love but for those who just want the highlights, the bullets come first.

• Overall, for the third month in a row, Seattle condo sales were up over the previous month with a healthy 20% growth versus March.
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• Belltown/Downtown is probably showing the most strength coming in with a nearly 50% leap in month-over-month sales and beating year-over-year sales by 26%.  
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• While demand (as measured by number of sales) has been gathering some steam, supply has stayed relatively flat with less units on the market in April than there were in January.
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• In summary, one of the stronger months we've seen in a while.  Who knows, maybe we're finally crawling our way out of the valley after all...
  
  

Cristalla versus 2200 Westlake...

A few years ago, it was most interesting to see which condo buildings were getting the most pre-sale interest.  Now that new projects are rare and the projects from the condo boom are changing hands for the first and sometimes second time, I thought it would be interesting to see if certain buildings took longer to sell than others.

Since the data is still limited, I ignored buildings that didn't have 3 or more 2BR unit resales (i.e., a previously purchased unit subsequently sold by an individual on the resale market and a brand new unit sold by the developer) in 2011.  For what remained, I looked at the average days on market for all the units sold and then plotted them in the bar chart below. The data includes bank owned and short sales as well. 

What's interesting is there appears to be three tiers of buildings.  Tier 1 buildings like Waterfront Landings, Continental, and Cristalla seemed to be able to find buyers for their 2BR units in a little over 3 months.  Tier 2 buildings like Cosmopolitan, One Pacific Tower, and Seattle Heights took almost 5 months to sell.  Lastly, Tier 3 buildings like Belltown Court, Watermark Tower, 2200 Westlake, Meridian, and Vine took a whopping 7 months or more on the market before they were sold.

Of course, if you cut prices, I'm sure you could sell any of those units much more quickly but there's no reason to think that Tier 1 sellers like Cristalla were asking for a lot less for their units than say Tier 3 sellers like those at 2200 Westlake.

   
        (Data is individually extracted from NWMLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.)

By Wendy Leung with Seattle Condo Review. A guide to Seattle condos exclusively for buyers and sellers.