Real estate market is looking good

“The real estate market is looking good,” said local realtor, David Nelson in a recent interview. He and two other realtors, Kay Cochran and Bill Wilkins, acknowledged that the local real estate market was good last year, for everyone.

According to Nelson sales were unremarkable in 2012. Not much property over $150,000 was moving. In 2013, prices improved and realtors had better sales than they had had in years.

“There are currently 52 residential listings on the multiple listing service, said Cochran, who was more cautious. “Before 2008, we would have had twice as many listings. Foreclosed homes dominated the market for a time. They were so low priced people were hesitant to list their homes. They are waiting for an uptick in the market.”

“We know there is another batch of foreclosures that are going to come on the market,” she added. “We’re waiting for the banks, who are waiting for the values of the homes to go up.”

“A bright spot in this last year is that a lot of our local young families were able to purchase homes,” Cochran said, “and that is very satisfying, to be able to find homes for these people. So even though we had the horrible mess of these foreclosures and people losing their homes, there was a bright side.”

“Every year has had some differences and some fluctuations,” Cochran said. “We are not going to see pre-2008 prices in the $300,000 range. That is not going to be typical for a long time yet.”

“But with spring on the way,” she said, “listings are picking up. And we’ve got eight sales pending right now.”

“Nelson is more hopeful that they may sell some homes in the $300,000 range. And Wilkins has noticed that some of the owners of higher end homes are starting to list.

“They seem to have a good feeling about it,” Wilkins said. “But still the lower end homes that go for $150,000 or less remain popular.”

“There were a lot of vacant homes, or foreclosure homes,” Wahkiakum’s Building and Planning Department Manager Chuck Beyer said, “so that was what the market was using. They weren’t building new. Last year it started to come back to new homes again.”

A graph of building permits showed that requests almost halved between 2007 and 2008. The total number has been holding pretty steady, standing at 58 requests last year, and there have been seven requests for permits this year so far. There were five permits issued for new homes in 2012 and more than twice as many the following year.

According to Nelson, there are six homes currently under construction in the county.

“Properties have gone from over assessed to properly assessed,” County Assessor Bill Coons said. “This county, when I took office, was assessed at 120 percent. They are now at 98 percent. “

“My feeling is that after values dropped since about 2007-2008 when the economy went down the tube,” Coons continued, “they continued to go down in ‘09, ‘10 and ‘11. What happened in ‘12? I’m not a 100 percent sure but I would say they went sideways. But it came up in 13. I never used to see sales come in above assessed value and now it’s fairly frequent.”

“In general,” he said, “the prices have bottomed out and are coming up.”