THE REAL ESTATE CHASE | No cheap ticket to Madison Park

Moreover, there is virtually no other inventory of housing available close to the million-dollar mark.  The median price of a listed house in Madison Park as is more than $2.7 million, as of October mid-month.  That’s the highest median value for listings I have seen in the more than five years I’ve been covering the neighborhood’s real estate scene.

Of the 19 single-family residences currently for sale here, there are only two that would pass as “affordable” (using the Madison Park definition of that term). Those two are priced at $1.082 million and $1.328 million, respectively. You’ll need to pay almost $2 million for any one of the next four higher-priced houses on the active list, with the remaining 13 for-sale houses ranging in price from $2.4 million to $4.5 million.

And as might be expected, all of these houses are big. There is only one residence on the market boasting less than 3,000 square feet, and the median size of the 19 homes is a whopping 4,200 square feet. 

State of the market

As is obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention, Madison Park has increasingly become “rarified” in recent years, bungalows making way for mega-houses. Based on current listings, however, it’s clear that the audience for single-family homes in Madison Park today is principally divided between the pretty wealthy and the very wealthy.

Of course, Madison Park wannabes can still rent an apartment here or even purchase a condo at a relatively low price point. Of the five condos currently available for sale, four range in price between $300,000 and $400,000, with the remaining condo listed at just less than $1 million. The median size of the five condos listed, however, is just 970 square feet.

Here’s the state of the market as we head toward winter:

Houses

Listings: 19

Median list price: $2.745 million

Median square footage: 4,200

Median price per square foot: $653

Average days on market: 64

Percentage with price reductions: 26%

New listings: 9

Pending sales: 4 

Condos/townhouses

Listings: 5

Median list price: $400,000

Median square footage: 970

Median price per square foot: $412

Average days on market: 172

Percentage with price reductions: 60%

New listings: 1

Pending sales: 1

House sales in the third quarter, meanwhile, exhausted the available inventory of lower-priced abodes. The median sales price of properties sold during the quarter was $1.475 million — that is $1.3 million (or 48 percent) less than the median price of houses currently available in the neighborhood: $2.745 million.

Seven of the 28 houses sold were less than $1 million, and only one house sold last quarter for more than the current median list price for houses in this market.

This is the breakdown of sales during the last quarter:

Houses

Sales: 21

Median sale price: $1.475 million

Average square footage: 3,430

Average price per square foot: $431

Average days on market: 48

Average discount from list price: 1.7%

Condos

Sales: 7

Median sale price: $365,000

Average square footage: 949

Average price per square foot: $385

Average days on market: 56               

Average discount from list price: 4%

Here’s a critical data point about third-quarter sales in Madison Park: Houses sold in just 48 days on average, with condos taking only slightly longer to change hands (56 days). Of the houses sold, there were only two outliers in terms of time on the market. No houses other than these took more than 60 days to sell, and the back story on one of the two is pretty good: The seller held out for the original list price and won the bet after 455 days — that house sold for $2.25 million. This was clearly not what’s referred to as a “motivated seller.”

And speaking of successful, we should include the sellers (eight of the 21) who sold their houses at their original list price or at a premium to list. The biggest winners in that regard were two sellers who achieved more than an 8-percent premium on their houses, selling them in six and eight days, respectively.

Most houses that were sold were very well priced to market, with only two homes taking a double-digit hit: 12 percent in one case, and 13 percent in the other. These houses both sold in less than 30 days, proving either that there are some motivated sellers still left in the market or perhaps just some who are not keeping up on what’s possible in this inventory-challenged environment.

Condo sales were also brisk (only one outlier among seven sales taking longer than 75 days), and the sold properties, for the most part, changed hands at or above their original asking prices. The sales ranged from a 680-square-foot unit going for $335,000 to a 1,113-square-foot unit unloaded at $705,000. The sold prices of condos, on average, achieved 99.88 percent of the final list prices of those properties, which is a pretty good statistic for any market.

BRYAN TAGAS writes the Madison Park blog (www.madisonparkblogger.com), from which this column was excerpted with permission. Laura Halliday of Windermere Real Estate compiled the sales data. Listing data is courtesy of Redfin, using information from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service. To comment on this column, write to MPTimes@nwlink.com.