Annual home-price declines deteriorated with July statistics as volume plummeted for both Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula (44 sales compared to 90). The peninsulas were not alone as all of Pierce County dropped 9.4%.
The graphs below show median prices (half the homes selling above and half selling below this price) have dropped 10% from July 2007 in both Gig Harbor and Key Peninsula. With this drop comes a year-to-date 7% slump on both peninsulas so July’s figures reflect a deepening descent in sales prices.
Key Peninsula’s prices have stayed relatively steady for the past three years while Gig Harbor has dropped from a high in 2006. A case may be made that new home sales with resulting higher prices have attributed a larger percentage of total sales in Key Peninsula than in Gig Harbor in recent years.
In fact Key Peninsula’s median price has been driven upward with about 25% of business in both 2006 and 2007 from new home sales, with sales prices slightly above the median for all home sales.
In Gig Harbor, as affordable building lots have dwindled, sales of new homes have declined from a high of a 27% market share in 2003 to just 9% in 2007. Both peninsulas have a finite number of building lots so Key Peninsula numbers will fall in the future as well.
NEW HOME PERCENTAGE OF SALES
2005 2006 2007 2008
Gig Harbor 20% 15% 13% 9%
Key Peninsula 26% 25% 18% 11%
New home prices in 2005 through 2007 hovered between $250,000 and $260,000 in Key Peninsula, above the overall median for the area.
Gig Harbor’s current median price is on a par with July 2005…just prior to the turning point in the historic ramp-up of prices over the first half of the decade. The number of sales started slowly drawing down in August of that year, although sales prices continued to climb throughout 2006 and much of 2007.
This year-over-year decline portrays only the single month of July of sales. June, with twice as many sales (83 compared to 44), actually experienced a 5% increase in prices.
Kitsap County experienced a 12.1% decline and King County 5.5%.
Carole Holmaas is an Associate Broker at Windermere Real Estate, licensed since 1967. Her real estate blog is http://blog.ISellGigHarbor.com. She may be reached at 254.549.6611 or Carole@ISellGigHarbor.com.