“Santa Clara was unbelievably hot,” Carlisle said. “But there has been a reaction to the high prices. When you add in last year’s rise in interest rates and the fact that their stock portfolio dropped, suddenly it made people a lot more cautious.”
‘Super Reasonable’
Caution was apparent on a recent sunny Saturday morning in Northwest Seattle’s Whittier Heights neighborhood as Ruslan Polyak propped up an open house sign by the front door of a yellow townhouse. Recognizing the market’s slowdown, he had listed it last month for $810,000, even though an identical unit sold last spring for $835,000, almost $100,000 above asking, he said.
Negotiations are welcome, he told a buyer attending the open house: “My client’s super reasonable.”
Later that day, Polyak cut the price to $787,000.
Randall, the Amazon employee, is waiting for her condo to sell so she can buy a new town home she signed a contract to purchase in November. In a sign of the market’s softness, the builder is working with her, reducing the agreed-upon price as she’s had to lower her own asking price. It’s now $480,000, a $59,000 reduction from the original listing.
Her agent, Bill Jones with Every Door Real Estate, said the changing market isn’t all bad: “I don’t mind not having to compete with 12 other people to win a client a house.”
This article provided by Bloomberg News.