Hard to believe: the Port­smith con­do­minium build­ing is a decade old. It occu­pies one of the best spots in down­town Kirk­land and still is one of the most desir­able places to call home. All but two of the 150 units have either one or two bed­rooms and many have views of Lake Wash­ing­ton, Seat­tle and the Olympic Mountains.

Sell­ing at a rate of about 10 per Year.
Today, one of my clients asked me about two of the six con­dos cur­rently for sale. What did they sell for three or four years ago? How long have they been on the mar­ket? I looked at the num­bers from 2004 to the present. Sur­pris­ingly, the num­ber of con­dos sold per year does not vary much by year: 8 in 2004, 11 in 2005, and 10 each in 2006 and 2007. There may have been a few more, but those are the ones listed at the North­west Mul­ti­ple List­ing Ser­vice (NWMLS) which was my source for all the data pre­sented here.

Today, They Take Much Longer to Sell.
The great­est dif­fer­ence from year to year has been the aver­age num­ber of days it took to sell. The chart below makes that clear. (I should add that for this chart and the aver­age price graph I did not count the sale of the pent­house unit in 2004 because the 1.5 mil­lion sell­ing price and the 250 days on mar­ket skewed the sta­tis­tics disproportionately.)

The cur­rently active list­ings (six) aver­age 150 days since first listed for sale. That’s about three times as long as it took to sell the 10 con­dos each in 2007 and 2006.

While prices are still going up the rate of increase has slowed down con­sid­er­ably.

What Sell­ers Ask and What They Get.
Per­haps most telling about the cur­rent mar­ket is the dif­fer­ence between Orig­i­nal List­ing Price, Reduced List­ing Price, and Sell­ing Price. In 2004, only one of the eight homes that sold, was mod­er­ately reduced in price. The aver­age actual sell­ing price was 1% above list price. In 2005 that sta­tis­tic changed slightly in favor of the buyer. In 2006, the aver­age Reduced Sales Price was 3.5% less than the Orig­i­nal Sales Price and the Sell­ing Price another 1.6% less for a total of 5.1%. In 2007, the sell­ers did worse, sell­ing their con­dos on aver­age for 5.4% less than orig­i­nally listed. The trend con­tin­ues into 2008: the cur­rently listed six con­dos have already been reduced by an aver­age of 5.2% which means that they will prob­a­bly sell for 8 to 9 per­cent below orig­i­nal list­ing price.

The Port­smith con­dos are still desir­able but sell­ers need to get more real­is­tic about pric­ing. Buy­ers, espe­cially those that are finan­cially healthy, have the edge.