Ballard home sales trend: comparison of end of 2010 and 2011 for 98117 zip code.
Sales of Ballard single family homes were compared for the last three months of 2010 (October through December) with the same time period in 2011 to get an overview of what the Ballard real estate market is doing. The 98117 zip extends from NW 65th Street to the south, NW 100th Street to the north, 1st Ave NW in Greenwood to the east and the Puget Sound to the west as seen in the map of sold properties.
Ballard 98117 area home sales
The current National view of the real estate market is that home prices have not yet stabilized / “hit bottom”. However, real estate is local and different cities and neighborhoods within cities will behave differently.
Statistics were generated by pulling data from the North West Multiple Listing Service / Realist sites. Please note that distressed properties were not included in calculations.
I looked at the following
- The total number of sales and overall median sale price
- The number of sales per price range
- The median sale price per price range
Total number of sales and median sale price: Note that “median sale price” is the price at which half the homes sold for above that price and half sold for below that price.
Total number and median sale price for home sales in 98117 area for October through December 2010 and 2011
The median sale price for ALL single family homes for the 98117 area dropped by 4.4% year over year when comparing the October through December period.
There was a drop in the total number of sales by almost 30%. This could be due to more sellers waiting to list their homes which results in less inventory on the market and hence less sales. Buyers may also be waiting to make the leap to buy a home.
A small number of distressed properties sold during these same periods: for 2010 there were 3 short sales and 2 bank-owned (REO) sales while in the same 2011 period there were 5 and 3 sales respectively. These numbers are too small to make any conclusions (besides being low).
Number of sales per price range: a break down of all the sales into different price ranges showed the following:
Number of home sales per price range for Ballard 98117, October through December
The vast majority of sales were for $600,000 or less. There was an increase in the number of sales below $300,000 but all other price ranges showed reduced number of sales (as expected from the overall 29% drop). For both years, the most sales were in the $400,000 to $500,000 range in keeping with the median sale prices being in the $400,000 range for all homes sold (see table above).
The largest drop in number of sales was in the $500,000 to $600,000 range however the numbers are small and so should be careful reading too much into them.
Median sale price per price range:
Comparison of median sale price for different prices ranges for Ballard 98117 for October through December 2010 and 2011
In an attempt to see whether the 4.4 % overall median price drop was “concentrated” in a particular price range, I looked at the individual median sale price for different price ranges. The only two price ranges to show significant differences from 2010 to 2011 are the $300,000 to $400,000 and the $400,000 to $500,000 slots of -3.9% and + 5.3% respectively. These account for the majority of the sales and appear to even out.
Disclaimer: as with all statistics, the larger the pool size the more reliable the conclusions. Might be worth looking at a larger time period, for example all of 2010 versus all of 2011 or including Ballard zip code 98107 to the south and see if I get the same observations.
