Northwest Living | Bellingham Real Estate Market

Seattle WA - According to Forbes Magazine Seattle ranks 15 out of the top 100 metropolitan areas for the fastest-recovering cities from the current recession. That’s not to say they have recovered yet, but are poised to do so as we come out of the recession.

The top cities on this list have diversified industry’s and relatively stable housing fundamentals that have provided local residents with comparatively secure standards of living. Seattle was ranked 5th overall on the Forbes survey for retail sales, and ranked high on gross metropolitan product (GMP) growth in the past year, and a low home foreclosure rate. Add up these three measures alone and Seattle would have easily been one of the top 10 cities on the survey.

What’s more, Seattle area home prices never ascended to the unsustainable levels the rest of the country hit at the peak of the housing bubble. Thus, it didn’t crash as hard. These factors have toughened the local economy against a recession that is inextricably tied to real estate.

To form this list, Forbes Magazine ranked the 100 largest Metropolitan Statistical Areas — geographic entities that the U.S. Office of Management and Budget defines and uses in collecting statistics — in five categories: unemployment rate, GMP (a measure of the size of a city’s economy), foreclosures, home prices and sales rates.

Forbes ranked September unemployment rates (the most recent available by metro) using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; the percentage of a metro’s homes in foreclosure with September data provided by RealtyTrac; and the change in GMP between the first and second quarter of 2009 from the Brookings Institution’s Metro Monitor. They also included the second-quarter 2009 year-over-year change in Freddie Mac’s Conventional Mortgage Home Price Index — a measure of housing price inflation — and the average days on the market for properties currently on sale, to measure sales rates. They then averaged the scores for each measure to arrive at an overall ranking.

The magazine stated that ”areas where home prices don’t fluctuate wildly are particularly well-positioned to ride out this recession, because they were spared the domino effect of foreclosures, lost jobs and lost productivity”.

Seattle was the number one city on the entire West Coast & in the Western Region as a whole. The next West Coast cities on the list were Silicon Valley’s San Jose, California in at number 56 and then Portland, Oregon right behind at 57.

There’s a lesson to be learned from the cities at the top of the list, some of which aren’t economically thriving, but all of which are well-equipped to emerge from the recession in a similar position to where they started. Rather than chasing rising home prices or apparently plentiful jobs in one-industry towns, families looking for long-term economic stability should seek spots where industry is diverse and housing price shifts are benign…like Seattle, Washington.

However, I believe that Western Washington has a lot more going for itself with it’s natural beauty and quality of life we share in this region vs most of the cities ahead of us on the survey list.

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

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

Seattle, WA - Advancements in technology have forever changed many aspects of our lives, especially in our homes. While smart home devices have been around for years now in small numbers, a new breed of computerized products from a new diverse group of suppliers is ready to enter the marketplace. This is good news for developers who, if they add smart home automation systems as a value added service, can expect long-term revenue streams. 

One product example being marketed for homes is a wireless keypad that can activate lighting, arm and disarm a security system, operate a garage door, set off a panic alarm, and change temperatures. It features an elegant, slim design which mounts on any wall where a light switch is desired but electrical wires aren’t available to connect it to.

An LED indicator on the front of the switch visually confirms that a signal has been sent. Applications for the new keypad include the ability to control lighting where a wired switch is not possible and to place the control station anywhere desired, e.g., a desk drawer, bedside or in a detached building for safety purposes.

In the Seattle real estate market there are new homes for sale with high tech features of the future, a smart building technology with premiere interactive software design and networking that provides residential services all with the touch of a button. The interactive network allows owners to utilize the homes amenities, observe security functions and review and communicate various home functions. This is all done through one unified system, a wireless touch screen located in the residence. Features include:

 
• Always on High Speed Internet. With near T-1 speeds to the unit, residents enjoy lightning fast downloads and send and receive music, pictures and videos like never before. 
• High Quality Digital Phone Service. “Ready-to-Go” digital phone service provides owners with flexible service allowing unlimited local and long distance calls as well as advanced digital phone services. 
• Automated Amenities. With the touch of a button residents can retrieve their car from valet, add and remove access rights for guests, access security cameras around the property, place a spa reservation, etc. — Video and Entertainment Services. The television will never be the same with the highest quality digital television on display in each home. Channels are available from around the world.

To help builders generate revenue streams, an idea has been spawn with a new business model that enables developers to generate revenues from advertisers and commissions from nearby service providers that soon reap a return on their smart home investment.

Everybody wins; the resident gets the convenience of smart home automation and value-added services, the developer gets additional revenue streams, and advertisers and local service providers gain access to their customers.

The concept could be used in large condo projects or even some housing communities. Centering on elegant touch-screen control panels, a company could provide residents with a wide variety of smart home features, such as security, lighting and climate control, as well as managing all their music, satellite TV and home theatre entertainment and digital storage systems. In addition it could enable numerous interactive communications and services with the larger community.

For the developer, the system could provide an essential security solution and is also a medium for communicating community news, upcoming events, alerts and general information about the community that would be of interest to residents. For nearby shops, restaurants, sports clubs and service providers the technology provides a medium for them to unobtrusively advertise themselves to their customers.

The old idea of smart home features like climate control and automatic curtains is only a fraction of what today’s technology is capable of, systems today enable developers to provide their residents and local businesses with true value added services which in turn generates an ongoing revenue stream for them.

In our market in Whatcom County, I could see a community system like this being of great value to communities like Semiahmoo Resort, Homestead in Lynden, or one of the future Bellingham communities where residents want community information. Developers are continually pushing the envelope in terms of the level of luxury they are providing for their residents. Now that they can turn what use to be considered an additional cost into a source of revenue, I can see developers adopting smart home solutions for their high end customers.

Smart home technology has generally entailed either large-scale custom solutions for luxury homes, or inexpensive gadgets used by tech-savvy consumers wanting to design and implement the solution themselves. A new range of wireless technologies look set to take the price of automating a home into the middle ground between the two extremes seen previously, meaning that automation is set to become much more affordable, and mass-marketable.

At a time when property development is changing, so too will the minds of business development decision makers. Builders and property developers who view smart home automation systems as a cost-effective value added service and invest in this unique way to conduct business, could be at the forefront of realizing long-term revenue streams.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Whatcom County Real Estate

Puget Sound, WA - When the U.S. housing market hit the skids, home builders in our area that thrived by offering large homes and expensive amenities began to rethink their home designs with an eye toward making smaller, less costly homes.

Three years into the downturn, that trend appears to be intensifying, as many builders scramble to make their wares palatable and affordable to new home buyers and compete with a market full of resale homes and deeply discounted foreclosed homes also on the market. The problem with builders shrinking their floor plans, is the basic fact they actually make less money on the new home because hard costs like lot prices, permit fees and sub contractor prices haven’t moved much at all. 

Puget Sound home builders are taking steps, as the industry seeks to stem losses due to falling home prices, tighter mortgage lending standards and skittish buyers. New home sales fell in August to the slowest pace in 17 years, while the median sale price fell 5.5 percent, but on the plus side sales were up 5.5 percent.

The trend in smaller homes is a reversal of more than two decades of expanding floor plans, during which median size single-family went from less than 1,600 square feet to more than 2,200 square feet.

That steady drive by home builders to deliver increasingly bigger homes peaked during the housing boom. Derided by some as McMansions, these super-sized homes packed with amenities helped drive up home prices even more.

Beyond competing with preowned homes on the market, declining home prices have also made it less profitable to build large homes. Builders need to factor in much more into the equation of building and marketing a home a lot more today than in the past ten years.

The only way to respond to the lower price environment … is to make the home smaller.  As you kind of reduce the floor plan size, we’re getting back to more the way things were historically, kind of undoing the excesses, not just from a price perspective but home size and fewer amenities.

In my Bellingham real estate market, a builder I work closely with, had to re-evaluate the size of homes and amenities in them to make them more affordable towards their demographic market of empty nestors and retirees. After a thorough evaluation of their market they have made the required adjustments to meet the price point that would attract those buyers, without sacrificing quality.

In some markets of Seattle I’ve seen homes, while smaller, feature large open spaces, a so-called great room often linking the living room and dining room area that might have previously been walled off. The homes also have a two-car garage standard and storage space.

Sometimes the builder has to look beyond just the square footage and instead focus on the utility, efficiency and flexibility of the home. It’s all about creating a niche and differentiating your home from the competition. You could have a three-bedroom, 2,500 square-foot single-story home and all you had was wide hallways and bigger rooms. It wasn’t really giving (buyers) the utility.

The bottom line is that builders need to first get back to the basics: What people can afford is the type of home they’re going to buy. If you can add a few extra items to set yourself apart and still have decent margins on the sale, then consider yourself lucky.

Builders will continue to build smaller houses and that’s a function of price, because financing is more difficult to get today.

Home buyers’ tastes, possibly influenced by tighter mortgage lending, are also helping drive the changing trends in new homes.

Big formal entries, high ceilings and lavish light fixtures are also not as high a priority among many buyers these days. In the mid to lower range newer homes, fewer buyers are opting to upgrade from a standard laminate kitchen counter top to a granite counter top.

Builders have also had to downgrade the level of amenities and finishes built into its showcase homes, to reflect the base price of homes.

With move-up buyers, for a long time everybody wanted the biggest house on the biggest lot with the best view and all of the options. What we’re seeing today are instead homes being built instead with a lot fewer options and the size of home considerations.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA - Ferndale Homes For Sale

Seattle, WA - I just attended the annual Education Conference held every year in Seattle for Realtors in our state. The event was put on by the Washington State Association of Realtors and is the largest event each year for Realtors state wide to receive education opportunities, attend a trade show, and learn about important topics of our time.

This years event was held at the Doubletree Hotel in SeaTac after years of being held at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue, WA. The event was sponsored by NWMLS, RMLS, Quadrant Homes, and others.

Some of the classes that were offered included International real estate, Surviving & thriving in this market, Mandatory CORE curriculum, NAR Code of Ethics, and at least 12 other classes. On the Tuesday Oct 7, I used the full day to attend two classes by Amy Chorew on Advanced Internet Marketing, and Complete Automation. Amy Chorew is an excellent national speaker on technology strategies for the real estate industry and I would highly recommend her.

Towards the end of the day we covered the topic of real estate blogs and the uses of them in our business. I had the opportunity to meet Marlow Harris, a well known Seattle real estate blogger, who also blogs for the Seattle PI, Inman news, and many other blog forums. Marlow shared a lot of great ideas about real estate blogging with us in class and how we can use our blogs to inform end users about real estate.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA Real Estate

Portland, Oregon, takes the top spot as the greenest city in the U.S., according to a ranking of the nation’s 50 most-populous cities by SustainLane, an online guide to news and products related to sustainable living. This is no surprise at all to us that live here in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

The rankings “track the unfolding story of cities working to improve their residents’ quality of life,” SustainLane said on its website. “In this story, some cities are becoming more self-reliant and better prepared for an uncertain future, while others have been slow to act on opportunities to green their municipalities.”

In ranking the cities, SustainLane looked at sixteen factors, including transportation options, air quality, roadway congestion, tap water quality, housing affordability, solid waste diversion and local food availability.

Portland, which SustainLane said has been “thinking green since the 70s, when the rest of the country was still embracing the strip mall,” was noted for its strict land-use policies. It is in the process of converting itself into a so-called “20 Minute City” in which residents spend a maximum of twenty minutes commuting from their homes to work and other activities. Portland ranked first in all sixteen categories except affordability, natural disaster risk and water supply.

Third on the list was Seattle, WA for many reasons. It’s location between Puget Sound and Lake Washington and to its easy access to just about any kind of outdoorsy activity your sustainable heart desires. Seattle is very committed to it’s area wide recycling programs. SustainLane’s site said In 2006, more than 90 percent of Seattle’s energy supply came from renewable sources. And by the time light rail plans are complete in 2016, Seattle ’s streets should be free from car congestion, trees and green buildings ubiquitous, and two-wheeled commuter sightings more common than an overcast day.

San Francisco, Chicago, and New York rounded out the top five on the list. Chicago ranked first in the category of water supply and New York took top honors in the categories of metro transit ridership and land use.

SustainLane started ranking green cities in 2005, and the last report came out in 2006. In gathering the data, the site relied on the U.S. Census to determine the most populous cities, along with public data and its own research.

If they ever do a study on smaller cities, Bellingham, WA would rate pretty close to the top of that list. It’s no secret that our area is a leader nationally when it comes to Sustainable Connections, the Green movement, and the Quality of the outdoor life we enjoy here in Whatcom County.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group Realtors - Whatcom County Real Estate

Seattle, WA - According to Forbes magazine Seattle is rated as one of the top ten cities across the nation for sellers to market their home. Though Seattle doesn’t suffer from oversupply, inventory last year doubled to 1.8%, from 0.9%, which would be more problematic if 1.8% wasn’t the eighth lowest rate in the country. Seattle will get a small boost from conforming loan adjustments, and trouble from the uptick in inventory will likely be mitigated by strong job growth (2.8%, sixth best in the nation) and a 42% decrease in new home construction.

Seattle experienced construction rate cuts creating decent demand for their housing market. The Seattle area went through its own bust in 2002 and 2003, as the result of mass overbuilding. Since homes can take upto a year to finish, when construction rates plummet, as they did in Seattle from 2003-2005, it takes years before those adjustments are felt. By 2006, Seattle had the lowest vacancy rate in the country, and wasn’t as prone to the price adjustments felt elsewhere, making it the 10th best sellers market today.

San Jose, CA was number one on the list, where tough regulatory measures make it difficult to overbuild. New home construction dropped 63% last year, while jobs grew by 1.2%. Home vacancies, which were already low at 1.6%, fell to a national bottom at 0.8%, helping make San Jose one of the country’s tightest real estate markets.

San Francisco, CA was second on the list. What helped the bay area was the fact that conforming loan limit jumped from $417,000 to the maximum $729,750, which makes getting credit a simpler affair for many of the San Francisco home buyers. In 2006, the real estate market felt a softening that pushed vacancy rates up to 2.4%, but a 56% cut in home construction has cut vacancy rates in half.

The Northwest and areas of the West have really outperformed most areas of the country through-out this slow down in the real estate market and should be the first areas to grow when the market recovers.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham Homes For Sale

Last week with the bad news out of Seattle about the fires in the Street of Dreams development, one of my real estate web sites called StreetofDream.com experienced very high traffic for that news day. You’ll notice that my web site domain there is missing the s, unlike the original StreetofDreams site.

It was amazing how much traffic my real estate website got from all the national news. I assume they either clicked on my site because It came up in the results a few pages back or they might have typed in the domain name and forgot the s. I can only imagine what the popular StreetofDreams.com web site had received over the last week. Anyways…it never ceases to amaze me how far the Internet has come in the last ten years and just seems to be growing more and more every day. 

My little Northwest WA Real Estate site is just a five page site that shows property listings up in my Northwest corner of Washington State with homes listed from $500k and up. It usually averages about 100 visitors a day, but that one day was quite a spike in traffic. Not exactly the way I would want to receive traffic, but never the less…it was interesting to see such a huge spike up.

Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham WA Real Estate

Seattle WA - Cooking Light magazine named it’s top twenty cities in the country that provide the resources people need to live healthful lives, and topping that list was our own Seattle, Washington. The magazine ranked major metropolitan areas on 15 different criteria, including healthfulness and exercise data, restraurant ratings, farmers market listings, and parks and recreation data. The result of that study were the list of the top 20 American cities that best fit their philosophy to eat smart, be fit, and live well.

The magazine said with an abundance of fresh local foods, walker-friendly streets, and inclusive attitudes helps make Seattle America’s best city for healthy living. 

Whether seen from the vantage point of a peaceful kayak excursion on the waters of Puget Sound or a morning tour of bustling food lover’s mecca Pike Place Market, Seattle always appears to be a place where healthful living comes easily and naturally. In our year-long countdown of U.S. cities that epitomize the Cooking Light philosophy, Seattle ranked highest for dollars spent on parkland—$266 per person annually, according to the Trust for Public Land. The American Podiatric Medical Association ranked pedestrian-friendly Seattle a top spot for walking. Nearly 85 percent of city residents report exercising regularly and 89 percent say they are in good or better health, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. And when Seattleites are ready to indulge, they can do so in any of the city’s many top-rated restaurants—it’s home to both numerous James Beard Award-winning chefs and restaurants ranked “extraordinary to perfection” by culinary review, Zagat. If you love Cooking Light, we think you’ll love Seattle, too.

Portland, Oregon came in second on this list making the Pacific Northwest a must stop for travelor’s looking for quality light dining. Life is good in the second-ranked city, thanks to its seemingly endless supply of outdoor activities, cutting-edge restaurants, and vibrant environmental consciousness.

Portland is called the City of Roses for its proliferation of brightly hued blooms, but the color that best describes this city is green. Portland prides itself on being environmentally friendly, boasting an award-winning public transportation system, 277 miles of bike paths, and city planning that minimizes sprawl.

The soft seasonal drizzle that falls over the city (actually, there’s more annual rainfall in Atlanta) makes it literally green as well. Consequently, Portlanders enjoy 227 parks and 146 miles of lushly forested hiking trails, rain or shine. The climate also nurtures the fabulous food and wine produced here, helping make Portland fourth in the nation in per capita farmers’ markets and top for its number of organic restaurants.

Portland earned the second spot on the top 20 list of Cooking Light cities because it also ranked highly in the following categories: acres of parkland per capita; percent of population that reports to be in good or better health; percent of population that exercised in the last month; and its walkability. Read more about Portland, Oregon restaurants.

Jerry Campbell - The Muljat Group - Bellingham, WA - Whatcom County Real Estate

Seattle, WA - The Emerald city was recently rated one of the best place’s in the country to find a bargain on a home, according to a recent story by Forbes Magazine. The Seattle Port has profited from the weak dollar, but the housing price growth has slowed.

The best place to get a bargain on a home is an area where there is a healthy growth in a job market and there are more houses available on the market than people to buy them. Seattle is one of Those housing markets where you have high inventories but pliable borrowers, with lenders willing to deal.

According to the magazine, they went looking for markets where the damage from risky lending hasn’t been as dramatic as in some parts of the country and where employment growth will burn off an over-abundance of inventory quickly. Washington State ranked 49th in the number of foreclosers, which helps the state tremedously if home owners are not losing homes.  Seattle, WA fit that bill perfectly, making it one of the best bargain spots in the country to purchase a home.

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