Kitsap Real Estate Statistics (Washington State)

Kitsap Real Estate Statistics

How to Use Sales Statistics To Negotiate A Fair Price For Your New Home

Accurate sales statistics can be one of the most useful tools for a buyer or investor to negotiate and obtain a property for the right price. If you or your agent are not using them properly you may be making decisions in the dark that could potentially cost you tens of thousands of dollars. Services like Zillow.com are great survey indicators for getting a preliminary l;ook at values in an area. Comparative Market Analyses or CMAs is the next level of information. These are provided by realtors who are members of the multiple listing service.

WARNING: What You Don't Know About Kitsap Real Estate Can Cost You

While Zillow and a professionally prepared CMA are very useful they do not give you any feeling for where you are in the market cycles. If you are searching for Kitsap County real estate, Bremerton real estate, Silverdale Wa real estate, Port Orchard real estate, Port Orchard new homes or Seattle area real estate alternatives you can obtain a huge market advantage just by understanding what I call trend indicators.

Trend indicators tell you if housing prices are currently trending up, down or are stable. They can give you signals on whether you should be making multiple offers on homes with escalation clauses or whether you should be offering 105%, 100%, 97%, 95% or 50% of the asking price. Trend indicators properly prepared and presented give a buyer a powerful tool for making their offer credible. Every buyer wishes to pay less and every seller wants to get more. If your agent can present your offer with powerful trend indicator statistics this will set your offer apart from every other buyer that makes lowball offers for sport just to see if the seller will go for it.

Trend Indicators For Kitsap County Real Estate

These indicators that I am about to describe would apply to any well defined market area but the examples I will use come from Kitsap County, Washington, just west of Puget Sound across from Seattle. Trends indicators include days on market, % of asking price, relative changes in active listings vs. number of solds and average price trends based on closings. When calculated from accurate source data and presented in graphical formats they are a poweerful way to understand market movements in a glance.

From January of 2000 through January of 2007 average closed residential home sales in Kitsap County real estate increased 83.61% or an average of 11.94% per year. How can a buyer use this. Well, if a buyer had purchased tha average Kitsap County home in January of 2000 for $159,986 with "0" down their "average" home would have been worth $292,757 in January of 2007, an increase of $132,771. This long term view might give me confidence as  buyer that market timing is not important in buying a home...time IN the market is what is important.