Madison Park real estate by the numbers

When we last posted a monthly real estate report, one of our loyal readers wrote in to comment that all the charts and graphs were putting him to sleep.  Another reader, however, responded that his reaction to the post was quite the opposite:  he was having trouble getting to sleep.

Obviously, not everyone is into the local real estate scene to the extent that we are or necessarily wants to be confronted with the details, especially if the news is bad.  Madison Park Blogger covers real estate so extensively that at least two national blog-listing sites categorize us as a real estate blog, rather than hyperlocal one.  We intend to continue our intensive coverage of the Madison Park real estate market and to do so, when possible, in a quantitative manner.

So that said, here’s some data on how our real estate market looked over the past five years in terms of median housing values. The chart above (click to enlarge) shows that there has not been an overwhelming change in the price of sold houses and condos compared to the beginning of the period.  As was true for the rest of the Puget Sound region, Madison Park hit the high in 2007, with a median price of $1,100,000.  The Park rebounded in 2009 with a median price almost at that level: $1,060,000.  But the market declined in 2010 to $975,000, representing an 11% decline from the 2007 high.  For Seattle, it has been about a 28% decline since 2007.

Based on just these numbers, it appears that our neighborhood has done much better than others.   But this could be misleading.   The number of sales in Madison Park is just too small for these aggregate statistics to be as meaningful as they would be for a larger sample, such as West Seattle or Bellevue.  On the chart above (and on those below) the numbers appearing in the various columns represent the total number of sales for each year.  As you can see, Madison Park had only 128 sales in 2006, declining by 43% to 73 sales in 2009 before rebounding to 105 sales in 2010.   These are pretty small numbers, even for the highest-volume years.   The types of homes that actually sell in a given year can easily skew the data.  For example, we know that very few houses priced at $1 million or under have been for sale during the last two years.  Naturally, therefore, most the houses that are selling are in the upper market.  This may mask an overall lowering of housing values for the market as a whole.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to compare the median selling prices, both by year and by neighborhood.  The charts below, unlike the one above, show only single-family homes that were sold each year.

Here’s the story for our most-exclusive enclave, Broadmoor, which took its big hit in 2009, with only six sales during the year and a 13% price decline from the previous year’s level.  Broadmoor saw three times the number of sales in 2010, but a further 11% price decline. Overall, Broadmoor’s median price for a house is down 26% from the 2007 high of almost $2 million.

Washington Park, meanwhile, suffered a 29% decline in the median house price between 2006 and 2010, though there was a one-year rebound in 2009.  With only 14 sales that year, however, it was probably a few outliers that skewed the numbers upward.  As was true for Madison Park as a whole, there was much greater sales volume in Washington Park during 2010 than had occurred in each of the previous three years.  But the median price could not hold at 2009 levels.

Finally, for the rest of Madison Park, principally the area north of Madison Street, things look pretty good.  The median sales price in 2010 was actually higher than the price in 2006: $960,000 versus $935,000. That’s a 3% increase!  But in this area of the Park the height of the market occurred in 2008, when the median price was $1,250,000. Since then, the median price has declined by 23%.

And that, for what it’s worth, is the five-year Madison Park real estate story in graphs. Whether this data will make you sleepy or sleepless may depend on when, exactly, you purchased your home.  Or perhaps the bigger issue is whether you plan to sell your house sometime soon or intend to be carried out of it feet first.  We suspect that that those who are bored by the numbers are in that latter category.

[Thanks to Laura Halliday of Windermere Real Estate for compiling the data for these charts, based on information supplied by the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.]