Spokane home sales among best

Spokane’s second-quarter home sales were among the nine best out of 149 U.S. metro areas, the National Association of Realtors reported Friday.

But a Spokane real estate executive said that’s old news already. Home prices are cooling down to “traditional” modest growth rates, said Rob Higgins, executive vice president of the Spokane Association of Realtors.

The median price of existing homes in Spokane increased 10.4 percent in the second quarter of 2007, the national association said.

Forbes magazine, looking at the same numbers, added Spokane to a list of 10 U.S. cities that show “rising-in-value” real estate markets. The median price for existing homes went from $179,000 in second quarter 2006 to $197,700 in the same period of 2007, according to the national association.

“That’s looking at the second quarter and that’s a long time ago,” Higgins said. That second quarter is the tail end of a huge ramp-up in home sales in Spokane from 2004 to early 2007, he said.

He said home sales in Spokane this year, so far, are 6 percent higher than last year. Back in October 2006, the comparable number of total home sales was 18 percent higher than the year before, said Higgins.

“Relatively speaking we’re in good shape but what we’re seeing now is a reduction more on line with what I’d call the traditional Spokane pattern,” said Higgins.

He predicts home price appreciation between 1 and 3 percent next year. Using the same numbers cited by Forbes, he reckons third- and fourth-quarter 2007 median prices will climb about 5 percent from the same periods one year earlier.

Roughly 3,000 homes remain unsold in Spokane County; that’s 20 percent higher than one year ago, according to Higgins.

A month ago, he and other Realtors spotted a huge drop in home sales during September, compared with earlier months. “We were watching that drop and wondering if it would continue or level off, but it (the number of home sales) improved in October here,” he said.

August sales of homes were above 700, according to Spokane real estate data. They fell to 521 in September but rallied to 593 in October, Higgins said.

Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors, said two-thirds of tracked U.S. cities showed home-price declines in the second quarter this year; one third showed increases. “And most of the cities with gains saw modest gains,” said Molony.

The top growth in the second quarter was seen in Salt Lake City, where the median price for homes rose by 21 percent over 2006.

Among the top cities with double-digit price growth the common denominator is a strong local economy, said Molony.

“You see the same pattern generally of affordable housing, job growth and population growth. Those factors keep prices up. It’s just supply-and-demand.”