Leavenworth Real Estate Update – 3rd Quarter of 2008

Leavenworth home prices certainly have backed off from the great increases the area saw in 2007, but we have been lucky as of late to avoid the price drops that Seattle and King County have seen and that Wall Street has seen in the past two weeks.

The chart above shows what looks like a huge price drop – over $100,000 compared to the 3rd Quarter of 2007. However, the median price shows a much smaller drop. This tells me that the homes that aren’t selling are the homes in the uppermost ranges of our market.
The chart below shows the same market from a different angle.

 
This chart shows home prices in Leavenworth for the 1st three quarters of the year. So far this year, median prices are up compared to last year almost 3% and average prices are down 7%. (Since 2005 the median price for a home is up 9% and the average price is up 7%)
Are Leavenworth home prices up or down this year?
I guess that depends on what metric you prefer. More importantly it depends on what neighborhood you live in and what kind of home you have.

This last graph shows the activity in the marketplace during the 3rd Quarter. These are the number of single family homes in the entire Leavenworth area including Lake Wenatchee, Plain, Stevens Pass, Kahler Glen and Peshastin. The good news is that the number of homes on the market hasn’t spiked. That means that we didn’t overdevelop during our boom time and it also means we don’t have a huge number of folks being forced from their homes by foreclosures or interest rates increasing on sub-prime mortgages. The bad news obviously is that we aren’t selling as many houses as we have in past years.
I am amused by my comments at the end of 2007:
What will 2008 bring to the Leavenworth real estate market? I think much depends on external forces. What will the U.S. economy do? How will the stock market fare? How will the technology companies like Microsoft, Adobe, and Nintendo do? I tend to think we will see a slight increase in prices with longer market times and about the same number of homes sold in 2008 as in 2007. (Check back in January 2009 to see if I’m right.)   
Well, I guess I was wrong about the number of homes sold and maybe even about prices. Certainly the stock market and public opinion about the state of the economy plays a huge role in the direction that Leavenworth real estate will take.