Local housing executives and experts welcomed the slowing price growth as evidence of the market easing back from a frenzy to a solid level it can maintain.
“Double-digit appreciations scare me, because I don’t believe that they can be sustained,” said Matthew Gardner, a local land-use economist. “Incomes have a tough time keeping up with that.”
“I think that it’s good to have it level off a little bit,” Windermere Real Estate President Jill Jacobi Wood said. “I think they kind of need to so people can still get into houses.”
A more temperate market may shock sellers accustomed to the hot times of recent years, experts said. Gardner said the increasing number of homes on the market might be a sign that sellers are not willing to budge on asking prices.
“Everybody could just throw numbers on these houses, and they would sell (before),” Jacobi Wood said. “Now I think everybody needs to get the price right.”
Jacobi Wood said her agents still are getting multiple offers on well-priced homes, even in the higher end of the market. In a news release accompanying the new statistics, Northwest MLS Director Mike Skahen said homes in close-in Seattle neighborhoods still were selling well.
“Good houses in high-demand neighborhoods are still in very short supply in all price ranges with no shortage of buyers,” said Skahen, the broker at Lake & Co.
J. Lennox Scott, chairman and chief executive of John L. Scott Real Estate, said in a statement that the situation has gone from a “frenzy” to “more typical for a strong market.”
When prices start coming down, buyers tend to buy better houses, rather than spending less, said Glenn Crellin, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research at Washington State University.
But potential buyers who wait might still be disappointed, even if prices do fall, he cautioned.
“It is very conceivable that even though prices will come down, (increasing) interest rates will eat up much of the differential,” he said. “Are you going to be better off having managed to save on the purchase price? Maybe. Maybe not.”
By AUBREY COHEN
P-I REPORTER
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