Your Queen Anne Market Report for June 2020

We’re almost back from the lag in activity that occurred in April. Prices are resuming their upward rise. Demand is very high and the Fed just declared that interest rates will remain low through 2022. To do that, the Fed is buying enormous amounts of Treasury bonds and mortgage -backed securities, among other things, to keep the economy flush with liquidity and the rates low. If we did not have the Fed, we would all be in serious economic trouble.

There is nothing unusual with Queen Anne real estate except we have a lower than normal listing inventory, especially for the Spring time of year when many of our homes go on the market. Out of curiosity, I took a look back through the Queen Anne MLS data for the period from March 1-June 1 of last year to see how that compares to this year. During that period in 2019, we had 66 sales with an average time on market of 37 days and an average sale price of $1.426M. For the same period this year, we had 37 sales with an average market time of only 11 days and an average sales price of $1.525M. Of those 37 sales, 27 are pending sales in the last three weeks so I think that shows demand has recovered since April. Whenever you have significantly more pendings than actives, you have a strong seller’s market. I look forward to this price increasing trend to continue (although not at the same rate as years passed) and so does our Windermere economist Matthew Gardner. Please take a minute to listen to his latest post regarding prices(see below).

It certainly is more challenging selling homes amidst the restrictions and precautions we have to take now with the Covid-19 virus, but buyers want to buy and are not hesitant to view homes even with masks, gloves and booties. I have noticed that a very popular price point for homes runs between $850K-$1.35M. Then there are fewer sales until you hit $2M-$2.4M which is also quite active with market times under 10 days! Once again, demand is there. We are so lucky in Seattle to have buyers for $1M+ homes that are still employed. That is certainly not the case in most of the country at the moment. BTW, we currently have 31 homes for sale on the Hill.

In this report, I have included two attachments: the usual one with the specifics of the previous 30 day period for Queen Anne home sales and a graph of King County sales since the first of the year that indicates we are nearly back to where we were before Covid-19 hit. A cause to celebrate I think!

And that’s the way Steve sees it…

Make it another great month and stay safe!