The Cascade Team Blog - Market Conditions

Name Your Selling Price As More than 50% of Home Sales See Bidding Wars

For the sixth consecutive month bidding-wars have exceeded 50 percent for all home sales, reaching nearly 57% for the previous month alone.

Despite the ongoing pandemic and in many ways because of it, 2020 has been a record setting year for home prices and sales in and around the greater NW. Some sections of the housing market increased by nearly 30%.

With record low inventory literally causing a Housing Shortage Crisis We have many buyers out there looking and with a lack of inventory, we may just have a buyer for your home.  All it takes is 30 seconds to fill out the form below. Let us know what price you would take for your home, and if we have a buyer, we'll let you know! To learn more about what we offer our home seller clients, CLICK HERE.…

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Despite Covid restrictions on open houses, brokers, buyers, and sellers employ array of virtual tools to stay safe and fulfill housing needs

KIRKLAND, Washington (November 18, 2020) - Even though in-person open houses are not currently allowed under new and reinstated pandemic-related restrictions, broker-members of Northwest Multiple Listing Service (NWMLS) continue to provide services to home buyers and sellers using several contactless and virtual tools.

Feedback from NWMLS representatives include reports of sales by purchasers who made offers to buy based on virtual and live stream open houses without an in-person tour. One manager noted sellers appreciate being directly involved with their listing broker in establishing limits on the number of visits to their home and the strict use of CDC guidelines for post-showing cleaning/sanitizing.

On November 15, when Governor Jay…

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13 House Selling Superstitions for Friday 13th!

Friday the 13th is an unlucky day if you’re superstitious. And in case you haven’t noticed, it’s here! But we like to think we are people who see the glass as half-full. We prefer to look at the doomed day as an opportunity to reflect upon some unexpected nuggets of—you guessed it—real estate wisdom.

Do you salute a Magpie? Are you afraid of walking over three drains but will happily walk across two? Cultures are full of superstitions, with many finding their way into the world of Estate Agency. Seeing as it’s Friday 13th today, we thought we’d investigate further and take a look at 13 house selling superstitions from all around the world and through the ages.

The number 13 

The country as a whole appears to be increasingly superstitious, and…

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The 2020 Holiday season may be an even better time than usual to list your home!

During the crazy year that is 2020 the Holiday season may be an even better time than usual to list your home. As we careen at warp speed from Thanksgiving, Christmas, and all of the joyous (read: stressful) festivities in between, you might be tempted to take your home off the market—or hold off on listing it—until after the new year. After all, you’re swamped with cooking, shopping, and decorating, and the last thing you need is a bunch of potential buyers traipsing through your house, right?

Wrong!

Conventional wisdom says people should wait until the spring to get the most from a home sale. After all, inventory normally picks up in the spring when the weather starts to get warmer. This often leads to price wars breaking out in coveted…

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This Winter's 'Slow' Home-Selling Season May Be Hotter Than Ever

Winter is traditionally real estate's slow season. Between the cold weather and the holidays, the housing market typically plunges into a hibernation of sorts, with both buyers and sellers shelving any major real estate moves until spring.

This winter's real estate market, however, is shaping up to be unlike any other before it—and, contrary to what some may have feared, is slated to be an excellent time to sell a home. In fact, Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the National Association of Realtors, predicts “it will be one of the best winter sales years ever.”

Why? Chalk it up to a perfect storm of low mortgage interest rates, sparse housing inventory, plus a pandemic that's fundamentally changed how, when, and where buyers are shopping for…

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Anxiety among home buyers “incredibly high” as they vie for unpreceded shortage of homes across Washington state

KIRKLAND, Washington (November 5, 2020) – “Finding and buying a home today is more difficult than at any time in the past 40 years of my career,” was how broker Dick Beeson summed up the latest statistics from Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

The Northwest MLS report recapping October activity showed a 40% drop in active listings compared to the same month a year ago, an increase of 16% in pending sales (mutually accepted offers), and a year over-year (YOY) jump of nearly 30% in closed sales. The median price of single-family homes and condominiums that sold last month was $500,000, up 19% from the same period a year ago, according to the MLS summary, which encompasses 23 counties, mostly in Western and Central Washington.

Beeson, the…

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Can We “Talk Turkey” About Your Real Estate Career?

Now is the time to start setting the “Table” for your real estate business for 2021 (And maybe praying that we never see another one like 2020). At the Cascade Team we will show you step-by-step exactly what our top performers do to get to the positions they are at. Unlike at other companies, The Cascade Team will help you develop a business plan, implement it, and help hold you accountable to reaching the results and goals you set for yourself! A recent rookie of the year completed 121 transactions his first year, and another agent will earn over $1.3 million in commission income… And we’ll hand you the keys and blueprints to do exactly the same thing… It’s all up to you!  

We want to help you become the best agent you can be!

…

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Trick or Treat: The Oddest Contingencies Sellers Are Requesting

Some home sellers are requesting odd contingencies—from maintaining the wardrobe of a plastic skeleton at the front door to caring for their family pets—before they’ll accept an offer.

Contingencies typically involve obtaining financing or fixing issues discovered during the home inspection. However, The Wall Street Journal reports that sellers, who have the upper hand in the market, are feeling emboldened.

“I’m selling a house right now that is being sold with the cat,” Eli Karon, a real estate professional with Karon Properties in Santa Cruz, Calif., told the Journal. The cat has lived there for three years, and the owners don’t want to relocate him. The property attracted six offers and is currently under contract.

In…

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America’s Most Popular Horror Movie Villains, Mapped

No matter how you feel about scary movies, it's hard to avoid them around Halloween. This is the time of year when the faces of cinema's classic horror villains seem to pop up in every store window and television set you see. Depending on where you live, certain horror icons may be especially hard to ignore. Check out the map below to find out the most popular scary movie villain in your state.

Our corporate headquarters is in WA State where people tend to find the Alien from the Riddle Scott franchise the most terrifying. I’m pretty sure Janet Jolly-Porter our Director of Brand and Marketing would agree as she has already threatened her kids that if Aliens arrive she’s taking them “Out” before the monsters get a chance too. (Here’s hoping she’s…

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Sammamish named best small city to live in America

After topping the list just a year earlier as the "Richest" city in America (See: Sammamish Tops Census List of Richest Cities in America) Sammamish has now been named as the Best Small City to Live in America by Wallethub. 

SAMMAMISH, Wash. -- The Eastside suburb of Sammamish was named the Best Small City to Live in America by a new survey, though it was quite a bit of company from fellow Eastside neighbors near the top of the list.

Wallethub compared 1,200 cities across the nation with populations between 25,000 and 100,000 and scored them against 43 indicators ranging from housing costs to school system quality to restaurants per capita -- even how they are handling the COVID-19 outbreak.

Out of 1,200,…

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