Home sales are up, even for chilly November, but good luck finding your dream home
If you thought somehow that Pierce County’s supply of homes on the market was improving, think again.
The county’s months of inventory is among the lowest in the Northwest Multiple Listing Service coverage area in its latest report. Thurston County’s supply is even tighter.
As a result, November’s median closed sale price for single-family homes in Pierce County, $379,950, was up more than 10 percent from the same time last year.
Kitsap County is in a similar predicament with low inventory, and its median closed home sale price, $385,000, was up more than 16 percent from last year.
Thurston County’s closed median price at $349,900 was up more than 11 percent in November, and the county had the lowest ranking measure of months of inventory in the report.
King County’s median for its closed home sales, in comparison, was $661,500, but its upward price spiral has continued to slow down, up only 2.73 percent from 2018.
As King County’s market finally cools off, neighboring counties are reeling from the ripple effect as Seattle residents sought better prices elsewhere.
MOVING TO TACOMA
Mike and Lindsey Naglieri were ahead of the curve in purchasing their Proctor home in 2017, moving from their one-bedroom Capitol Hill apartment.
“It was kind of quiet at the time,” Mike Naglieri recalled recently in an interview at their home.
He still commutes to Seattle for work with Getty Images, while she has opened The Studio Tacoma, a high-intensity Pilates studio at 1742 Pacific Ave.
“We started looking around and in our price range, we were going to end up in, like, Shoreline,” Lindsey Naglieri recalled. “... we wanted to be somewhere where we could still walk places. That was really important to us, and something that wasn’t just, you know, shopping malls.”
The rest became a matter of what worked in terms of commuting.
Their agent, Sarah Nickel-Smith, a broker in the Coldwell Banker Bain Capitol Hill. office, is a graduate of University of Puget Sound, and knew Tacoma well.
“I think at the time some other brokers would have rolled their eyes when Tacoma was brought up,” she told The News Tribune, “but now the mental shift has certainly started to happen in Seattle in support of Tacoma, especially compared with, say, 2016.”
Mike Naglieri says his commute is “about 55 minutes, door to door.”
He says a big part of his staff at Getty commutes.
“We have a whole team of Tacoma employees, so it’s not just me down here,” Mike Naglieri said.
At her studio, Lindsey Naglieri says she’s meeting “a lot of couples who are in the same boat, but they’re in the beginning of the buying process, or they’ve moved into apartments here and are looking.”
Her commute is 10 minutes in the morning and maybe 15 minutes in the evening.
“It’s not that hard to make it work,” Mike Naglieri said.
Lindsey Naglieri said her own adjustment has surprised her.
“Now when I go back to Seattle, it feels hectic and it feels crowded. And I feel like I want to get back to Tacoma,” she said.
Mike Naglieri thought about what he liked about their home and neighborhood and ticking off various attributes. One aspect stood out.
“We have a yard here,” he said.
Sales by volume
According to the latest report, across NWMLS territory “November’s 7 percent increase in pending sales was the highest year-over-year gain for November since 2016. In 2017, the figure was a modest 1.6 percent, while last year’s comparison showed a drop of more than 10 percent.”
Active listings overall for the condos and homes market are down more than 39 percent in Pierce County from this time last year. In Thurston County, they are down slightly more than 40 percent.
“The housing market is virtually sold out in the more affordable and mid-price ranges where 75 percent of sales activity occurs in each market area,” said J. Lennox Scott, chairman and CEO of John L. Scott Real Estate, in Thursday’s report.
James Young, director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, said in the NWMLS report that some parts of Pierce County have “only recently reached price levels higher than 2007. Now they are rapidly catching up with other areas. It continues to be one of the hottest markets in the U.S.”
Broker Igor Mayster of John L. Scott’s Tacoma University Place office told The News Tribune on Thursday he’s looking at six or seven sales closings before the end of the year.
“A lot of my buyers were waiting for this time. You don’t have to fight somebody to get it, so it works for those who do have the time to look. A lot of times the buyers don’t want to be in multiple buyer situation.”
“We do have low inventory, so everything that’s coming out is selling if it’s priced well,” he added.
