Northwest Living | Bellingham Real Estate Market

Bellingham WA - in a recent survey more than half of the real estate agents who responded think the national real estate market will finally hit bottom sometime early in 2009, according to the Campbell Communications marketing-research firm. Fifty-two percent of agents who took the survey said the country should see the bottom of the housing market in the first six months of 2009. Additionally, 7.7 percent said prices have already bottomed out, and 16.5 percent believed that the bottom will happen in 2010 or later.

Traditionally, by the time you get to March, you’re entering into the spring-summer homebuying season, and that’s when sales pick up. If interests rates are still under 6% by then and home prices are still soft, we should start to see some improvements in our local Bellingham real estate market. Sales this year have been down about 32% across the board, if you include all of Whatcom County’s home sales.

So if the survey is correct, then what the real estate agents are saying is that as sales pick up, prices are also going to firm up or solidify at some point. I think locally as we approach the end of 2009 and the spotlight starts to shine on the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics we will most definetly see our Whatcom County real estate market return to normal.

In the survey, more than 2,500 real-estate agents also identified the three most resilient markets in the nation for selling homes. They mentioned that if they had to pick three states in the country that are large states and where property values really haven’t declined that much and employment has held up, the three states that would fit that criteria would be Texas, North Carolina and Washington state. It seems like every article that has been written during the past three years always includes Washington State and the Puget Sound region as one of the top performing areas in the country.

The biggest problem were having in Bellingham is that buyers that want to buy have to sell their current Bellingham home first. This creates a challenge for both home buyers and home sellers in making successful transactions.

Some of the fears home buyers have are with the difficulty in obtaining financing and the thought that home prices will continue to fall. Most Bellingham Mortgage lenders that I have talked to though, say that locally, lending has not been anything near as bad as other areas of the country. Locally, you can get thirty year fixed mortgages at around 5.75%, which is pretty good coupled with lower home prices.

I think people are just waiting to hear that the market has hit bottom, and once that reasonates through the markets, that’s when you will see buyers return in numbers. Right now, home buyers just seem afraid to purchase a home and then have their home value decline immediately by 10 percent or so based on what is happening to other properties in some communities across the nation.

But I also belief that some sellers are are also a little unrealistic about what their home is worth on the market, pricing it well above the going rate. When your in a down market or soft market like this, the last thing you want to do is price your home above the market. If you take this approach and home prices continue to drop, the home seller will be chasing a down market and end up getting less than if they had priced it right to begin with.

Well, lets see what happens this coming spring and hope that our Bellingham real estate and Bellingham homes for sale markets will begin to return to something more normal.

 Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Bellingham Real Estate