A few years ago, it was most interesting to see which condo buildings were getting the most pre-sale interest. Now that new projects are rare and the projects from the condo boom are changing hands for the first and sometimes second time, I thought it would be interesting to see if certain buildings took longer to sell than others.
Since the data is still limited, I ignored buildings that didn't have 3 or more 2BR unit resales (i.e., a previously purchased unit subsequently sold by an individual on the resale market and a brand new unit sold by the developer) in 2011. For what remained, I looked at the average days on market for all the units sold and then plotted them in the bar chart below. The data includes bank owned and short sales as well.
What's interesting is there appears to be three tiers of buildings. Tier 1 buildings like Waterfront Landings, Continental, and Cristalla seemed to be able to find buyers for their 2BR units in a little over 3 months. Tier 2 buildings like Cosmopolitan, One Pacific Tower, and Seattle Heights took almost 5 months to sell. Lastly, Tier 3 buildings like Belltown Court, Watermark Tower, 2200 Westlake, Meridian, and Vine took a whopping 7 months or more on the market before they were sold.
Of course, if you cut prices, I'm sure you could sell any of those units much more quickly but there's no reason to think that Tier 1 sellers like Cristalla were asking for a lot less for their units than say Tier 3 sellers like those at 2200 Westlake.
(Data is individually extracted from NWMLS and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.)
By Wendy Leung with Seattle Condo Review. A guide to Seattle condos exclusively for buyers and sellers.
I just bought a unit at 2200 Westlake and it was very hard to get a mortgage because it is very hard to resell the mortgages for FNMA. I was told there are multiple reasons for this (rental ratio is ~ 50%, too much commercial space, not enough reserves). I don’t know if that explains the entire difference, but it may be partially to blame.
Makes sense on 2200 Westlake and mortgage challenges. While it’s unfortunate, it’s something to consider when buying a place since the next buyer will need to get a mortgage too.