September ’08 Stats

By in Tri-Cities Housing Market with 0 Comments

This month we’re going to take a glance at the upper-end market.  I was perusing the September numbers for homes over $500,000.  A total of three sold, zero went under contract, and there were 139 listings available.  For the Tri-Cities, that seemed like an incredible amount of upper-end possibilities!

I did some more research, and found that 55 of those are part of a condo development which is not slated to be finished until 2010.  They’re units in a group of high-rise towers on the banks of the Columbia.  So, I removed them from consideration, as they won’t even factor into the market for another eighteen months.

The absorption rate is the time, expressed in months, it would take for all the houses in a category to sell if they continued to sell at the current rate and no new units came on the market.  We find this number by taking the under contract figures from the last six months and adding them together, then dividing that number by the months considered and then you arrive at the absorption rate.  So, for houses over $500,000, removing the 2010 condos, we have an absorption rate of 25 months!  An absoprtion rate of 1-3 months indicates a seller’s market. 4-6 months is balanced, and 7+ months is a buyer’s market.

So, if you have a really expensive home you are trying to sell in the Tri-Cities, sit tight.  You’ve got a couple years to wait.

September 2008 chart

Download the full Tri-City Real Estate stats for September, 2008. (657k PDF)

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About The Author
Cari McGee

My husband and I came to the Tri-Cities in 1994, and we thought it would be a temporary stop on our way to larger cities. He was a television sports anchor at the time, and we planned to go wherever the "next step up" took us. Twenty-plus years later, we're still here and we've loved every minute of it! We have two children now, and we've found the Tri-Cities area is a wonderful place to raise a family. It's a great place to do outdoorsy things -- I like to hike Badger Mountain or run along the river path. I also love reading ... by a cozy fire in the winter or a beautiful picture window in the summer (with the A/C on!). I've been a licensed Realtor since 2004. I earned my managing broker's license in 2016, which means I can run my own brokerage, or create a team of real estate agents and supervise them, which is exactly what I did when I formed the Cari McGee Real Estate Team in 2018! We have administrative and marketing personnel, as well as additional agents to serve you. I became a director of the Tri-Cities Association of Realtors Board of Directors in 2016, became Secretary/Treasurer of the organization, and was elected to Vice President in 2019. Want to talk about real estate? Click here to schedule a meeting with me!

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