Bothell Housing Inventory Hits a 15-Year High

So Bothell, Washington, it just hit a milestone that nobody's talking about yet. And it's the number of homes for sale. It's the highest that it's been here. In the last 15 years, guys, so if you bought a house in Bothell during the COVID craze or you just have been there forever and you're thinking about selling, this is what this is going to mean for you. I'm realtor Emily Cressy. My website is homeproassociates.com. I live in Lake Forest Park and I work in Bothell all of the time. And every month I go into the actual Northwest MLS data and pull the numbers so we can track what's going on In these different markets and make good decisions, I find that garbage in garbage out, you got to have good data going in so you know what's happening and you don't have to guess. Bothell is one of the markets that I'm watching really closely right now because it had one of the wildest rise anywhere in our region back in 2020 and 2021. It had a huge run up during COVID. It was the tech boom and it was the COVID boom and Bothell was the hotspot where it was affordable and still had access to the East side. During that time, the median home price jumped from around 707 to $892,000 in one freaking year, In one freaking year, almost 200,000 in one year. People were waving inspections, writing letters to sellers. I had people crashing into each other, trying to get to my open houses. It was a party and it got loud fast, baby. But if you fast forward to today, there are 322 homes for sale in Bothell as of September. And the last time it was this high was 2011. So kind of after the market crash, right? That was 15 years ago. And this is not really a small shift. This is pretty significant. Buyers are suddenly getting the kind of choice in this neighborhood that they have not had since before a lot of them probably even started looking for a house. So the part that matters, the part that's important is that prices have not really crashed. They haven't come down that much. Bothell's median home price sits at just over 1,030,000 right now. And that's only a little bit off its recent peak. And still 46% above where it was back in 2020. So the party got too wild for a couple years, and now things are just sort of settling back down to a normal pitch. Some of this is the same thing hitting a lot of the east side markets like Bellevue and Redmond, right? And the whole tech corridor is kind of suffering from that. We saw A lot of hiring during COVID, now hiring has slowed down. There have been some layoffs. Compensation is not as high as it used to be a couple of years ago, and that takes a lot of the urgency out of buyer behavior. I'd say it's not that people don't want to live in Bothell. It's that fewer of them are rushing or having to rush in order to get their house. To sum it up here, inventory in Bothell is at a 15-year high. Prices are down just slightly from the peak, and They're still way above where they were at pre-pandemic levels. So if you're buying a house in Bothell, you finally have room to negotiate a little bit. You can take your time. You can look. At multiple houses on multiple weekends, you can ask for an inspection and you can ask for things to be fixed after the inspection is over. So that hasn't really been true here for a long time. And if you're selling a home, price it based on today's comps, not what was happening in your neighborhood in 2021. And be really cautious if you're using any of those online home value estimators like Zillow and Redfin and that type of thing. That's not where your listing price should come from. Those estimators tend to run high in this area and the gap gets even wider. When the market is shifting and it's shifting pretty fast over the last couple of months as AI comes, tech comes, interest rates come, a real comparison of what's actually selling right now is going to serve you a lot better than sort of past year aggregates. So if you want to know what your Bothell home is actually worth in today's market, you can book a call. There should be a link down below in the description of this video. And if you want to see what's happening just down the road in Shoreline, I just published a video on that. which you can take a look at too and I'll see you soon on a future video.