Slashdot Mirror
Seattle Region Home To 10 of Nation's 30 Most Competitive Neighborhoods For House Hunters (geekwire.com)
After a recent report revealed Seattle had the nation's hottest housing market for the second month running, it should come as no surprise that many of the most competitive neighborhoods in the country are clustered around the Seattle region. From a report on GeekWire: Redfin, a Seattle-based real estate and technology company, crunched the numbers on the most competitive neighborhoods from house hunters across 27 U.S. metro areas. Four of the top 10 and 10 of the top 30 hottest neighborhoods are in or near Redfin's hometown of Seattle. Bellevue, Wash.'s Factoria neighborhood, home to T-Mobile, is the most competitive neighborhood in the country. Seattle's University district is second, followed by two neighborhoods in Boston, Mass. Redfin ranked the neighborhoods based on the percentages of homes that sold for cash and sold for more than their asking price. Analysts also considered the median days on the market and home price growth in each neighborhood. Home prices in the Seattle area are soaring, fueled by booming job and population growth.
Yeah and where do you live in the meantime? A box? The point of a house being an investment is that instead of paying rent you are building equity. If person A pays 2000 monthly in rent and person B pays it towards a mortgage then in 15 years person A gets no return but person B can sell the house for 300000 plus. Sure there is upkeep expenses but they rarely exceed equity.
You think most of this is because people are trying to make money from buying a house?
In Seattle, a lot of it is. There is certainly a demand for new houses from investors and from people moving to the area. But the housing market is booming and people certainly are buying houses to remodel and flip on the market. I was just in the house buying market and there are just about no fixer-uppers left in the city, and even those sales are being determined by insane bidding wars between the buyers, and will most likely be back on the market the next year. Drive through some of the older neighborhoods with 50+ year old houses and you can tell that about half have been remodeled and repainted in the last few years. I'm not saying those house flippers are going to come out ahead in the long run, but it is certainly happening and driving the market that much more.