Current Statistics

With all the talk about how bad the real estate market is you might ask "how bad is it, really?"

Well, here are some of the most current Whatcom County statistics on real estate.

In Bellingham alone we had 103 used, single family homes sell in the month of May. Compare that to last May when we had 157 used homes sold and you will see that we are off last year by 54 sales.

New homes sales in Bellingham performed slightly better with 24 sold this May and 27 sold last May.

Looking at the Whatcom County real estate market as a whole compared to last year and using year to date numbers rather than individual months we are down 23.1% from last year. This number includes all types of real estate (residential, condos, multifamily, land...) and covers all of Whatcom County.

So what about pricing?

In Bellingham the average price for a used, sigle family home this year in May was $357,351. Last May the average for the same category was $342,309.

That is a 4.4% increase over last year in Bellingham.

In northern Whatcom County including Ferndale, Lynden & Blaine our average price for a used single family home this May was $317,354 compared with last May's average of $332,700 gives us a decline of 4.6%

As we head to the east county including Deming and Sumas we saw an average sales price of $202,423 this May and and average of $196,837 last May. This gives us an increase of 2.8%.

So while sales are still slowly pluging along for most of us our average sales prices have continued to increase slightly and those for those who did see some decrease in average sales price it could have been worse.

The good news is that most of the ecconomists I have been reading are predicting a recovery of the real estate market for the second half of 2008.