My son has been out in Seattle for a few years, is doing ok, and decided he's tired of paying rent.
He decided he wanted to buy a house.
Looking at the prices out there. aye caramba
even small condos or townhouse are above $500k.
I don't know if I should tell him let the bubble pass or if inflation is going to underfill the bubble and make prices permanent
And of course interest rates are going up as well.

 

My nephew lived in Seattle before he moved here. Housing has been expensive for quite awhile. If he can get into the market, he should do it asap. It will not get better IMO. Nephew said it was more costly there than in the DC area, which is saying something. He was barely able to buy here not long ago. Only reason he won out is that he was the first bid on a place and the owners were building a house and were anxious to sell. He lost out on a couple before that with multiple offers.

 

He looked at one house, nice, single level, well maintained, 1100 sq. ft., .35 acre. fingertip lot with streets on both sides. Ok neighborhood.
In 2010 it sold for 199K, asking is $599k offer submittal deadline is today, 3 offers in already.
yikes.

 

It's like that here also and I think also most of the country I haven't heard of any reasonable areas to move to. A majority of the houses I have been working in over the last year have been recently purchased and in addition to high sales prices, due to multi bid's and overbid's, a lot of them have issues but it's a supply/demand issue people pay up irregardless

 

This market is crazy. Our home went up in value by 16K in one month. However, where are you going to go. New cars are another example and there are so many other crazy price increases. I feel bad for folks living on a fixed income and low income families.

 

That's my question where do you go if you lose your housing. I rent and if I lost my place I have no idea where I would go. We have many cases here were people who have been renting apartments are getting evicted because landlords are turning them into Air B n B's. In many cases these are people with children and they have nowhere to go.

 

I have heard of the insane prices in Seattle forever. Friend of the families son lived there and he was a dentist and still complained about the price of housing and that was 10 years ago lol. The market is crazy too but that area is super inflated all the time it seems.

As far as the market in general, having just sold and bought a house I have read and listened to a lot about it. General consensus is dont hold your breath. Prices will be high at least through 2023. While the higher rates are scaring off some buyers, it is also scaring away some sellers since they too would end up with a new loan on a different place with higher interest, so the main issue (Supply vs demand) is not going away. We also have less people getting dumb loans that they cannot afford (like in the last recession) so more people can actually afford the houses they are buying meaning less risk of what we saw in 2007/2008.

We debated if we should hold and wait it out, but given all that info and the fact that we sold our last house, we would be paying rent until we bought so even if we got a house cheaper in a couple of years we would have paid like $25,000 rent in that time period and still not saved anything overall. We did find what we wanted, although at a higher price than I liked but still well under what we could afford and jumped on it. Just closed about 2 hours ago actually lol.

 

Good move! Congratulations!

 

Thanks! We were getting pretty put off by what is out there right now so happy to find something we liked As always, old house, have some things I am going to do to it, but a few acres, outside city limits and has a garage and a large shop, so we are pretty happy with it!

 

A close relative sold his house for 1,050,000 that he purchased 12 years ago in the 400K range. Then a second offer came in 200K+ higher and the buyer had to match it or lose, so it sold for nearly 1.3M. Nice to get an extra two hundred thousand in one pop.